Municipalities across Europe broadly do similar things, much of which is related to managing and looking after the physical environment of our cities, towns and villages. Services such as open spaces and parks management, waste collection and management, street cleansing, highways maintenance require enormous resources.

Indeed these services make up some of the largest contracts that municipalities manage. They can be carried out in an environmentally very friendly way or might themselves substantially add to the burden which municipalities place on their local environment. It is refreshing to see the amount of good practice that is developing in all these services.

The measures that can be taken to reduce impact (and incidentally save costs) include:

• Use of environmentally friendly machinery to reduce emissions including dust and noise;
• Use of resource efficient including recycled materials;
• Managing services in a way that eliminate waste arisings;
• Adaptation of services so that they help reduce adverse environmental impacts in the community they serve;

Many changes are possible:

• parks wood waste becomes feed stock for local CHP plants;
• road resurfacing materials that include glass (for friction and reflection) or rubber (for less noise) help find uses for recycled materials;
• new, low energy, white street light helps reduce crime and vandalism;
• gas or electric powered vehicles reduce tail pipe emissions. They can also help reduce CO2 emissions;
• grass cutting regimes adapted to the new growing patterns arising from climate change can provide a more effective service;
• better waste collection techniques can reduce the contamination of recyclable materials. This allows for higher recycling rates.

These and many such changes can be built into service specifications. New contracts will then deliver improved environmental performance.

Global to Local has developed a number of training courses that are aimed at helping municipal staff improve the technical specifications of their environmental services contracts. We also advice local authorities through our EMS work on ways of improving key environmental services.

So far we have developed specific training programmes on

• Parks and Open spaces management;
• Street cleansing;
• Highways management;

Other areas such as waste management are in preparation.

• We help benchmark specifications against current best practice in Europe;
• We help develop improved specifications either by direct advice or through interactive training with relevant stakeholders;
• We arrange for study tours of best practice in Europe and arrange for placements of key officers to absorb techniques applied elsewhere.
• We help develop linkages to other cities where best practice is applied. To see the work that G2L has done in this field, click here.

For an overview of related projects Global to Local have participated in click here.