Zero Carbon Luton - Issue 2, 2025
Apps for Good, a better station, and some poetry
Thank you for reading the Zero Carbon Luton newsletter, as we track the progress towards a sustainable town by 2040. It will take all of us, and so your interest matters! In this edition:
Schools present apps for climate action
Sign that petition for a better station
Luton’s leadership on school climate plans
Poetry about a hill, on a hill
Pupils share tech ideas for a better world
Students from across Luton and the region have taken part in the Climate Change and Digital Innovation Summit, presenting their work on environmentally themed apps. Teams from 16 schools in the Chiltern Learning Trust met at Venue 360 to display their apps, give demonstrations of their tech, and hear from other young coders and tech professionals.
Each team presented their app from the stage and at a stand in the hall, with visitors and experts voting for a favourite. The winning project was Cedars Upper School with an app called Cedars Uniform Marketplace. The team identified the multiple benefits of reuse as a climate action: reusing school uniform reduces waste, and also builds community and saves families money.
Marston Vale Middle School created an app to help their teachers cut down on paper use and took second place. Third place went to an eco-art app developed by a team of girls from Lark Rise Academy, which creates artwork and music from walks in nature.
Among the other projects were apps that educate users on deforestation or recycling. The team from Chiltern Academy focused on food waste and the benefits of composting. Lea Manor High’s wellness app helped people to draw the connections between their own health and the health of the planet.
The Climate Change and Digital Innovation Summit, now in its third year, is organized by Denbigh High School, the Chiltern Learning Trust, and Apps for Good. Students use free learning resources from the tech education charity Apps for Good, along with their app development platform.
A petition for station renovation
In 2009, then Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis announced funding for the ten worst stations in Britain. Luton was named among them. As you may have noticed, that new station did not materialise. Labour were swept from power and plans were cancelled, and 16 years later we are still waiting for a station fit for the town.
Multiple campaigns to improve the station have stalled, and funding has been granted and then delayed or cancelled on more than one occasion.
James Taylor, councillor for High Town and portfolio holder for regeneration, has created a petition that calls on the government to work with Network Rail and deliver the necessary investment. “There are hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment coming into the town as part of town centre regeneration,” councillor Taylor points out, “and yet our railway station is in such a decrepit state. It’s an embarrassment because this is the first impression rail users get when visiting the town.”
The petition includes step-free access for Leagrave Station as well as Luton Station, and already has over 4,800 signatures. Sign it if you haven’t already, and pass it on.
Luton leads on school climate plans
The Climate Action Teacher Champion (CATCH) programme has concluded, finishing a 5th cohort and a total of 33 participating schools. Developed by the council and University College London, with Groundwork East and Youth Network, the programme trained teachers in sustainability, and helped schools to develop a climate action plan.
By supporting schools in this way, Luton was a frontrunner in what is becoming a movement of climate action in schools. The government announced its sustainability strategy for education in 2022, suggesting that every school should have a climate action plan. The CATCH programme launched the following spring, making Luton one of the first places in the country to start working with the strategy.
This did not escape the notice of the Local Government Association and the Department for Education. Both of them wrote about Luton’s approach as a case study for others to try. Hackney Council is among those that have been inspired by the Luton model, working with cohorts of schools that will be paired with a Climate Ambassador.
The funding for CATCH has now come to an end, but a number of other services have launched since CATCH began. Schools can now call on volunteers from the Climate Ambassadors programme or advisors from Let’s Go Zero. (If they contact the latter, they’ll get me, as that’s my day job.)
If your school missed out on CATCH, hit the button below to discover some alternative support options.
In other news…
Safer School Journeys is a new campaign from the council and the Bedfordshire Road Safety Partnership, working with seven primary schools to make roads safer and encourage active transport.
It’s good to see that Luton is one of the signatories to the Green and Decent Homes proposal, calling on government to “modernise, upgrade, and improve council housing so that homes are safe, healthy, energy-efficient, and a genuinely good place to live.”
15,000 trees are to be planted at Dunstable Downs, creating a new woodland near the tree cathedral and Dell Farm.
This being a climate solutions newsletter, I haven’t covered the approval of Luton Airport expansion. But yes, that’s happening. Calls for a judicial review have begun, including a crowdfunded legal case from LADACAN.
And finally… Nature Calling
Chilterns National Landscape are facilitating a major arts project around the Chiltern hills and the communities that live amongst them. More on that another time, but I thought I’d share a snippet of poetry from Luton poet Lee Nelson. He has written a series of poems inspired by the Chiltern hills, developed out of workshops with local people on Barton Hills and Waulud’s Bank. You can read them all here, but given the talk of climate action planning above, this extract from the poem Beginner’s Hill seemed appropriate:
So, go there, ascend
and once you’re up
sit down, form a ring
talk
listen
plan
Form a plan
because on the other side of a summer like this one
who knows where you might land
what you might have got done