Welcome to

MIDDLESBROUGH Environment City

Please be aware of this updated list of Eco Shops in and around the Middlesbrough area, and be sure to share it with those who you think may benefit from it!

Our Climate Action Middlesbrough team are currently pushing for wider electric vehicle use within MEC: After all, it’s a quick win when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint. Given how road traffic counts for the majority of transport-based emissions, which in of itself accounts for approximately one-fifth of global carbon emissions, electric vehicles are one of the key components in transitioning to a net-zero world.

There are numerous articles espousing the benefits of electric cars, but our Climate Action Middlesbrough have earmarked this article from Cassadee Palmer as one worth reading. Give it a gander!

On Wednesday 1st June, our team attended a Jubilee Community Fun Day at Beechwood Allotments which was jam-packed with stalls, activities, food and more: We provided invaluable information to those who attended, cooked up a storm, helped create potted plants, drove our well-loved smoothie bike and much more. We’d like to thank all who attended: It was certainly a highly enjoyable day!

Our utterly fantastic Active Travel team (Who are putting in the good work this #WalkToSchoolWeek teaching children how to safely cross the road and teaching Bikeability to help children safely cycle!) have attained their 1st 4 Sport certifications for Instructing Cycle Training! This certification is a necessity to teach Bikeability (Becoming mandatory on 31st March 2024), so our team managed to pass and complete their qualifications quickly and early, meaning they’ll be teaching Bikeability for a good while yet! Fantastic work, team!

MEC had an absolutely fantastic 30th Birthday celebration on May 6th, attended by past and present members of staff, board members, special guests and more! We’ve attached a gallery highlighting the guests, the speeches and more: It was a fantastic day for reflection, and hopefully we’ll be celebrating more anniversaries to come!

Here are dietetic students Katie & Hajar from Teesside University, who have worked tirelessly with us on an internship with Joe Dunne, presenting John Kabuye from Ubuntu Multicultural Centre CIC (https://www.ubuntumc.org.uk/) with a poster for their EcoShop customers! The piece of work specialised in African Food and Nutrition and includes the African & Caribbean Eatwell Plate as an easy visual guide in regards to what a healthy diet should consist of. Excellent work from Katie and Hajar here!

For more information on EcoShops in your local area, please visit https://ecoshop.org.uk/!

A massive thank you to everybody who showed up to the Albert Park Easter day: It was a successful outing for us here at MEC! Our Eco-shop was a huge hit, almost running out of produce, our Affordable Warmth team dispensed a lot of advice and free lightbulbs, our Smoothie Bike never stopped spinning and dispensing smoothies, and our stalls for Rooted in Nature and Climate Action Middlesbrough alongside Actes Employability made for a lot of entertainment and got a lot of people thinking, particularly Dwiti’s stall in regards to water waste!

Albert Park was absolutely thrumming with people and energy, and we were glad to see so many people there. It was awe-inspiring and made us so ecstatic to see so many of you around! Keep an eye out on our social media: we’ll be at more events soon and we can’t wait to get out in the community more and host more of these events on your doorstep!

We were busy out at the Hemlington Clean Sweep, with many members of the public rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck in to help clean up in and around the Hemlington area, including Hemlington Lake! Please enjoy some photographs of our view of the day of action, where we tackled a stretch of the Blue Bell Beck: The things we found, my goodness, we could start an entire thrift shop! Our favourite find, as you can see in our first picture, was a large plush unicorn: Not so magic anymore, we’re afraid!

Needless to say, it was a fantastic day out, part of Middlesbrough Council’s Big Green Week alongside partners including Linx Youth Project, and we’re happy to see that Hemlington is now looking somewhat cleaner!

Food often goes to landfill: It’s a sad fact of life, and one that costs the planet just as much as it costs our wallets. Supermarkets, if they have too much food, will often let a lot of good food go to waste: Food that is perfectly edible and can be used to fill bellies instead of bins!

We managed to collect a lot of pallets from P.D Ports, filled with tons of biscuits! Thanks to P.D Ports and our lovely staff (Pictured here are James and Rachael, hard at work!), these surplus biscuits won’t be clogging up landfill and contributing to excess waste: We collected the pallets and now they’re out in our local networks to be distributed to people! Cheers, we’ll raise a cuppa to that!

People of Grove Hill: Your community needs you! Community action days, litter picking, tree planting and more, there’s a Big Clean-Up going on with a partnership involving Thirteen, Linx, Tees Valley Wildlife Trust, Middlesbrough Council and more! Find out more through the leaflets attached in this post!

 

A huge thank you to the volunteers from BT (British Telecommunications) in Middlesbrough completing some of their corporate volunteering hours with the Community Actions Team on March 21st! They worked in partnership with Tees Valley Wildlife Trust and Climate Action Middlesbrough to rake and prepare the land for the wildflower meadow. The teams also helped us clear over 2 tons of green waste from the site as well as numerous bags of litter. A huge thanks to them and our Kickstarts for all their hard work in helping to transform this area!

The final event of the Green Shoots Project takes place on Thursday 24th March at Middle Marsh Nature Reserve. Find out more about this event on the poster below!