Sustainability

We are committed to improving our environment and reducing our carbon footprint. We can make changes on our doorstep that will benefit our local environment. Our behaviour and decisions can help to meet wider UK sustainability and carbon targets.

What the Council is doing about environmental sustainability:

Our five-year corporate plan, Reigate & Banstead 2025, includes an objective to reduce the Council's own environmental impact, support local residents and businesses to do the same, and to make sure our activities increase the borough's resilience to the effects of climate change.

To help achieve this objective, The Council's Executive agreed an new Environmental Sustainability Strategy and Action Plan in July 2020, which commits us to making our own operations, and the borough, a more sustainable place to live.

We recognise that all our employees can play their part in improving the environmental sustainability of our operations, and have recently launched a Sustainability Network for all interested staff.

Our environmental strategy and action plan

We have identified three main sustainability themes, along with climate adaptation that relates to them all, where together we can make a big difference:

• Energy and carbon – reducing emissions and increasing renewable energy and fuel use.
• Low impact consumption - using fewer natural resources - such as cutting the amount of water we use and the food we waste.
• Biodiversity and the natural environment – protecting and enhancing our green spaces and ecosystems.

We are making progress, but there is much more to come.