Parish Councils
Rayne Parish Council
Rayne Parish Council is LED-ing the way when it comes to sustainable street lighting!
If you live locally, you may have already noticed the new lighting at various points around the village.
On discovering that Essex Highways had a surplus stock of LED streetlights, we put out a call to our parish councils to see if they could make use of them. The councils would only need to pay for collection and installation of the new lights.
Rayne Parish Council snapped up the opportunity and is now benefitting from the more energy efficient lighting. This has an immediate impact on costs, as they have been able to reduce the monthly maintenance needed for fluorescent streetlights.
LED street lighting uses up to 80% less energy than traditional fluorescent lighting, which also makes it a more environmentally friendly choice.
Councillor Diana Garrod, Lead Member for Climate Change and Sustainability and Deputy Cabinet Member for Transformation, the Environment & Customer Services, said: “This shows what our strong partnership with other councils at county and parish level can achieve. The lights are excellent example of reuse, which will continue to save the parish council money and contribute to carbon reduction.”
Chair of Rayne Parish Council, Councillor Mike Eldred and District and Parish Councillor Ann Hooks said: “We are so pleased with the new lights, which will help to keep our streets illuminated and safe, at a fraction of the output of their predecessors. We are delighted that Rayne could lead the way and would encourage other parish councils to take up this offer.”
Feering Parish Council
To find out how our local parish councils and organisations are tacking climate change in our district, we visited Feering Community Centre to see the incredible work they have achieved.
Feering Parish Council accessed several different grant funding streams including £20,000 from the Essex County Council Climate Action Fund and have successfully installed 39 solar panels to the roof of their Community Centre, swapped the centre's lighting to LED, replaced aluminium windows with double glazed UPVC and replaced a 1987 gas boiler with a far more energy efficient model.
The Parish and the local community are continuing to work hard to reduce their energy usage and are also looking at various means of harvesting rain water.
As part of our Climate Change Strategy, we are actively working to support our parish councils to help tackle climate change, and have produced a list of grants that are available to support both communities and residents.
For more information, or to let us know how we can help to support you further, please get in touch via email climatechange@braintree.gov.uk.
