Zero Carbon Luton - Issue 6, 2023
Retrofit open home, car-sharing, apples and a green hub
Welcome back to another issue of the Zero Carbon Luton newsletter, sharing stories of climate and environmental action from across the town. In this issue:
Visit the retrofit open home while you can
Is Luton the top town for car-sharing?
An imaginative idea for all the town’s apples
Networking with the Green Hub
Visit the retrofit open home
The council has launched a retrofit open home for the Autumn, and is inviting visitors to tour the property and see some low carbon technologies for themselves.
The house is a three bedroom family home on Abbotswood Road, Round Green. Over the summer it was retrofitted to low carbon standard, in partnership with Luton Rising. It features a number of points of interest for those looking to reduce both their carbon emissions and their bills:
Solar panels and storage battery
Heat pump
Heating controls
Insulation and triple glazed windows
Compost demonstration
Open the cupboard under the stairs, and you will find the building’s gas pipe, now closed off and capped. This is an all-electric home, powered by the solar panels on the roof. The batteries, also under the stairs, capture solar power to use at night, and the system can provide around three quarters of the home’s electricity needs over the course of the year.
Outside the back door you’ll find the heat pump, pulling warmth from the ambient air and piping it into the home. Come and see for yourself how it works, and whether it might be suitable for your own home. (More details and photos here.)
With a waiting list for homes in Luton, a council house can’t be kept empty for long. Residents will be back in January, so book in a visit while you can.
Booking a tour is easy - just click the button below and choose an available time slot.
The top town for car-sharing?
Luton leads the nation in car-sharing, according to recent research by Uswitch. They looked at the availability of shared cars and car clubs, and concluded that “Luton tops the rankings with 32 car share registered cars in the area, equating to 14 cars per 100,000 population.”
The methodology reveals this research to be carried out online, with no real fact-checking behind it. Maybe we need to file it alongside the similar PR lists that incorrectly named Luton as the most energy efficient town in the country, and the one where we were the best place to be a vegan.
There are of course shared cars and vans available in Luton, such as Enterprise Car Club or Co-Wheels. Market leader Zipcar has no presence here yet. There are others that aren’t here any more, such as the pioneering all-electric E-Club, which was bought out a couple of years ago. Luton does appear to be over-represented on Hiyacar though, the peer-to-peer car-sharing platform. So perhaps there is some truth to the matter.
Whether or not we belong at the top of the car-sharing rankings, access to a car on an occasional basis is a useful part of a sustainable transport system. It allows people to take public transport or cycle for most trips, and borrow a car when we need it - for that big trip to Ikea, for example. You can’t exactly pedal your Billy bookcase down the M1 on the back of an e-bike.
So why not check out how you could share a car with your neighbours, and let’s see if we can live up to that rumoured top spot.
Making juice with the apple amnesty
Do you know of an apple tree near you where the fruit doesn’t get picked? You’re not alone, writes community gardener Konni Deppe.
Surprisingly, many fruit trees in Luton’s back gardens and public places go unharvested. Fruit will still provide food for birds and insects, but some of it ends up in people’s brown or even black bins, and make its way into landfill or incineration, adding to our CO2 emissions.
Inspired by a similar project in nearby Hitchin’s Triangle Garden, I wondered whether I could collect this fruit and turn it into apple juice instead. So the Luton Apple Amnesty was born.
To test the process from tree to bottle, the Edible High Town team and I produced a very small batch of juice last year. We offered a tasting event at St Matthew’s Primary School. People absolutely loved the juice, and it was sold out by Christmas.
This year, to be able to scale up, we joined forces with the social gardening project Penrose Roots and applied for a grant from Love Luton.
We had two drop-off locations where people could leave their harvest on specific days in October. For people who had a lot of fruit but couldn’t harvest it themselves, we did ‘home visits’ and picked them straight from their trees. We supplemented garden apples with harvests from local community orchards, Grasmere Nursery School, Luton Hoo Walled Garden, and the Stockingstone Road Allotment orchard.
Volunteers checked the donated apples for quality and to ensure a good mix of ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’. Together with Penrose Roots we organised the transport to Apple Cottage Cider press in Radwell, who professionally pressed, pasteurised and bottled our local crop.
In total we had 18 donations racking up 250 kg of apples, resulting in 227 bottles of delicious juice. The finished drink stores for 18 months, extending the time people can enjoy local produce.
Each donor who contributed more than 10 kg of fruit will receive a free bottle, and we’ll give some away to our helpers and donate some to good causes. The remaining bottles will be sold to help fund orchard activities in Luton such as pruning courses this winter. The juice is available at a suggested donation of £4 per bottle, for example at the High Town Christmas Market on 1 December.
The Luton Apple Amnesty is one piece of a wider project with the aim of turning Luton’s fruit trees and community orchards into productive, wildlife-friendly places that are loved by the community. You can support the work by buying local apple juice, donating fruit from your tree, or volunteering with many fruit-tree activities. For more information and contact, visit: www.lutonorchards.org.
Join the Green Hub
Stick December 14th in your diary for the next Green Hub, a networking opportunity for those interested in environmental action in Luton. It will be held at High Town Methodist Church Hall from 7:30.
The first Green Hub meeting was held recently and included participants from Friends of the Earth, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, the Green Party and more. We hope to make this into a regular event for sharing news about environmental action, coordinating events, and awareness raising. Get involved now and help us to shape the direction of this emerging network.
In other news…
We’ve reported on the drafts, and the council’s climate action roadmap and climate strategy have now been published.
Luton for Warm Homes hosted a community event and delivered a petition to MP Rachel Hopkins, demanding a programme of insulation across the town.
You can use Google Maps to encourage greener lifestyles in your area, by helping to add useful information for other users.
All Easyjet planes have been fitted with “state-of-the-art new software that significantly reduces carbon emissions and fuel costs.” The definition of ‘significantly’ is getting a run for its money here, considering it’s a fuel saving of 1%, but we’ll take it.
Since the last newsletter, the airport got the green light to expand from 18 to 19 million passengers a year.
What else? Let me know and I’ll put it in the next newsletter. In the meantime, check out more news and opportunities for action at the Zero Carbon Luton website.