We are committed to improving our environment and reducing our carbon footprint. We can make changes on our doorstep that will benefit our local environment. Our behaviour and decisions can help to meet wider UK sustainability and carbon targets.

We also need your help.

What the Council is doing about environmental sustainability

Our five year corporate plan, Reigate & Banstead 2025, includes an objective to reduce the Council's own environmental impact, support local residents and businesses to do the same, and to make sure our activities increase the borough's resilience to the effects of climate change.

To help achieve this objective, the Council's Executive agreed a new Environmental Sustainability Strategy and Action Plan in July 2020, which commits us to making our own operations, and the borough, a more sustainable place to live. We will report on this annually.

We can make a difference

We have identified three main sustainability themes where together we can make a big difference:

  1. Energy and carbon – reducing emissions and increasing renewable energy and fuel use.
  2. Low impact consumption - using fewer natural resources - such as cutting the amount of water we use and the food we waste.
  3. Biodiversity and the natural environment – protecting and enhancing our green spaces and ecosystems.

We are making progress but there is much more to come. 

Our energy supply is now carbon neutral - a third is supplied from renewable tariffs and the remaining carbon emissions are offset by investing in United Nations backed carbon reduction schemes

Read the Environmental Sustainability Strategy and Action Plan 

In October 2022, we took our second annual report on progress with our own Environmental Sustainability Strategy to the Executive Committee. The report includes updates on all of our Strategy themes and information on borough and council-level carbon emissions, and how we are working to reduce these.

Here is the report and the annexes for the Executive Committee (20 October 2022) can be found in the public reports pack.

Previous years’ reports can be found below: