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Reducing Redcatch Community Garden’s carbon footprint.
11/02/2025
Part of our net zero commitment.
Volunteers from our Bristol office upgraded the heating systems at Redcatch Community Garden in Knowle, Bristol to improve volunteers’ experiences and reduce the charity’s carbon emissions.
Using the £20,000 Hoare Lea decarbonisation transition fund, we helped upgrade the heating in the Redcatch Community Garden event space, making it quieter, more efficient and converting it to use vegetable oil-based fuel, reducing carbon emissions by up to 90%. The event space is used for many community activities that support mental and physical wellbeing including Welcome Spaces Community Lunches, running Art Therapy for children and adults with neurodiversity or who have experienced trauma, holiday clubs and school educational sessions.
The fund has also paid for a fuel store onsite to reduce trips to the petrol station and make it easier for volunteers to refill the heater. Future plans for the remaining fund include installing solar panels on the roof of the site’s cabins to decarbonise the electricity used in the office and cafe. The work funded by Hoare Lea will save an estimated 3,000kg carbon dioxide each year.
Kate Swain, Redcatch Community Garden CEO, said
We are very grateful and thankful for the improvements the engineers at Hoare Lea developed and implemented with our staff and volunteers. It has made our event space, quieter, easier to heat, and will reduce our fuel bills and our carbon footprint, aligning with the Garden’s sustainability aims. It also provides a more workable system for us to use.
We select an employee-nominated community project each year to help reduce its carbon emissions. This is part of our wider commitment to being a net zero carbon organisation by tracking and reducing its carbon emissions, then offsetting the remainder with a payment to an approved international carbon standard and investing in community carbon reduction projects in the UK.
Steve Peet, a Hoare Lea Mechanical Engineer and volunteer on the project said:
After spending time with the volunteers to understand how they use the space; we created a list of possible initiatives for the Garden and selected them based on their priorities and needs. I usually work on office projects so this has been really different and very rewarding to work on a project where you can see the benefits straight away.