Social Responsibility

Last Updated (Sunday, 04 October 2009 08:19)

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At St Nicolas we have a Social Responsibility group which is especially concerned with areas of Fairtrade and Environmental Awareness.

Fairtrade

We are proud to have been a Fair Trade church since 2006. We have committed to using fairly traded products whenever we serve refreshments. We have a stall offering Traidcraft, Zaytoun and other fairly traded products for sale once a month on the second Sunday. Additional products can be ordered from the Traidcraft catalogue.

Environmental Awareness

We have joined the Ecocongregation scheme (for more details see www.ecocongregation.org) but have decided, at present, not to seek the award. We seek to show our love of and gratitude for our wonderfully created world by promoting "reduce, reuse, and only then recycle".

We started reducing by stopping the use of plastic cups for hot drinks, and returning to using the china ones we already have. We have installed (second hand) dishwashers enabling us to reuse the cups conveniently again and again. We write encouraging and informative articles in our parish magazine, highlighting local networks such as Freecycle for reusing goods. We try to offering ideas for reducing energy consumption by publicising home energy monitor loan schemes, and the work of local groups such as the Green Mole Forum. We also write about the work of Christian environmental groups such as A Rocha, Operation Noah and Tearfund (for example, their Carbon Fast for Lent).

What we do most of is innovative recycling - we seek to collect and redistribute many things that Mole Valley District Council cannot. A list of what we can currently recycle is given below - and often items can be "recycled" for the benefit of charities. Good examples of this are the used stamps and printer cartridges we collect for which a monetary donation is made to a charity of our choice.

At present we collect:

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  • used stamps (distributed between 5 charities)
  • plastic mailing wrappers (sent for recycling to Polyprint in Norfolk)
  • old spectacles (passed on to Mission for Vision)
  • empty printer cartridges (recycled to benefit Mission to Seafarers)
  • old mobile phones (recycled to benefit Mission to Seafarers, USPG and AYME)
  • binoculars (sent by the RSPB to Third World conservation organisations)
  • plastic (supermarket) milk bottle tops (sent for recycling but with a donation to a charity)

Anyone in our community is welcome to collect - items can be placed in the labelled box under the Tower from which they are collected daily.

One-off collections in which we have participated in the past include books for a prison library in Kenya. Each January we promote and participate in the Woodland Trust's Christmas card recycling scheme.

We are proud to have become well known in the local community for these collections, and see this and our commitment to Fairtrade as an integral part of our church's Christian witness.