Shoreditch Trust has led the way in genuinely innovating new approaches to tackling the climate change agenda. This approach recognises the critical challenges of how to achieve environmental sustainability within a deprived inner city context, putting community involvement at the heart of the process, enabling personal contributions from citizens of Shoreditch.

Our approach understands that making choices about how we adapt to meet the challenges of climate change needs to permeate through everything we do, and is about more than individual lifestyle choices available only to the financially comfortable. Environmental innovations are designed to support that objective, taking problems that exist in our urban context and designing bespoke interventions that will work in our local community. For example, establishing innovative approaches to the restaurant industry, setting up organic waste schemes that work in high density estates, or designing solar paving because we do not have the pitched roofs that existing products assume and require.

The Trust has worked closely with the London Community Recycling Network to develop new approaches to how we deal with the waste produced locally, weather that’ commercial or residential. This has already produced a ground breaking investigation of the potential uses of Anaerobic Digestion as a means of producing energy from waste within an urban setting and has informed national approaches. We are now rolling out an innovative approach to collecting and locally reprocessing organic waste, including developing final end uses for compost material produced through the Community Growing Initiatives.