Little steps add up to a big impact at Grace Vineyard!
Written by the Creation Care Team at Grace Vineyard, Christchurch
Creation Care Team planning session
At Grace Vineyard, we deeply care about the natural environment that God has placed us in and called us to be wise stewards of. We believe caring about our world is an integral part of following Jesus. Every day, we see and hear about how our actions are impacting the environment. At Grace, we want to play our part and make meaningful and environmentally sustainable choices when it comes to the products we use and companies we support. We’re excited to let you know some of the steps we’ve taken to become better stewards over the past year. We’ve been working closely with the leadership team and over the past few months, we’ve made some really exciting changes across our church – and we would love to share these with you.
Paper, Stationery and Operations:
All our paper is now recycled – excludes some of the heavier grades of paper but includes other stationery items such as lever arch folders, file boxes, and post-it notes. This saves nearly $570 per year. Using recycled paper means less trees are cut down, which is better for the world’s air quality, land, and means less destruction of wildlife habitat.
We’re printing our weekly bulletin monthly to cut back on paper. You can find the bulletin on our website. This saves approximately 26,500 sheets of paper and saves $270 per year.
We downsized one of our printers at City Campus and added a second one at Beach Campus to help improve efficiency. This will save us $2,443 per year. By making these changes we are also hoping to reduce printing by 10-15%.
Toilet Paper, Tissues and Paper Towels are now all recycled and Forest Stewardship Council certified – which is the highest level of protection for rare and endangered forests and wildlife of any existing forest certification scheme. Making this switch is also saving us lots of money that can now be used in other areas of our ministry.
We have changed accounting software and other operating systems to reduce printing.
We are using reusable batteries to reduce the number of batteries that we put in landfill – thanks James Drummond, our IT Manager!
Thanks to James Drummond and Chris Pennington, our Beach Campus Operations Manager, we now have electronic signatures so that we can sign documents online. This saves precious time for our staff and also reduces printing.
We’re in the process of doing a review on the remainder of our office products so that we can become better financial and environmental stewards.
Hospitality:
Drinking Chocolate/Milo has been replaced by Trade Aid Drinking Chocolate which is organic and Fairtrade. This means cocoa producers are paid a fair wage, and workers are not exploited through the growing process. It also comes in home compostable packaging and is $3/kg cheaper – a great saving considering we use a lot each year.
North Canterbury are now using Butterfly Cups for their coffees rather than standard disposable ones. These are home compostable and aren’t going to landfill. Reducing the amount of rubbish going to landfills is a great thing because landfills aren't designed to breakdown products – and like we saw recently on the West Coast – even though rubbish may be buried, it is with us for life.
Thanks to the amazing Paige Adamson, we are now serving biscuits that are free of packaging at City, Beach & West Campuses. These are locally made in a supermarket bakery.
City and Beach campus now have reusable produce bags to fill with fresh fruit for our kid’s programmes, worship team and events during the week.
Our instant coffee has now been replaced with Organic Fair Trade and is in home compostable packaging.
West and City are offering a .50c discount on coffee when a reusable cup is used as an incentive to reduce waste.
We have got discounted rates with Ecostore and Trade Aid products – these are open to the whole church to purchase. Ecostore aims to produce environmentally friendly products that don’t have any nasty chemicals in them. Through our discounts, you can get great prices on their bulk products (5L & 20L). By buying in bulk, you save on plastic and can refill your containers at your own home, and by using these products, you reduce chemicals that flow into our oceans.
We have found a great reusable replacement for communion cups made of aluminium and will be rolling this out across all of our campuses. This has a cost upfront, but the payoff period is just over 12 months.
Our disposable coffee lids (not the cups just yet) are made of pulp and are home compostable! These break down in three weeks, and only cost us $0.02 more per lid.
We’re removing the plastic cups from City Campus and replacing with glass alternatives.
After reviewing our bins, we have made changes which save us $2,668 per year but we have the same volume.
Events:
Organised waste management teams for most of our large events to help direct and clean the waste/recycling/organics before it goes into the bins
Worked together with A Rocha and other churches to run two conferences on caring for creation in Christchurch.
Hosted several film nights and inspiration evenings with various speakers to inspire the team. This is critical because our actions flow out of what we believe, so we need to input into the beliefs/culture to inspire volunteers.
Consulted with staff event planning teams where possible to reduce the impact of choices for events - e.g. ice blocks vs scooped ice cream etc.
Most of these changes save us money which is amazing, but we are also so pleased that these changes improve our stewardship of your generosity and our environment. We have a massive impact on the environment around us, we’re a church of more than 3,000 people – that’s a lot of waste produced each week both at church and at home. Becoming more sustainable is something that we’re really passionate about and we are keen to see changes in this area. We know that each campus is slightly different in what they’re doing and what stage they’re at, but we’re working towards a common goal across each of our unique campuses.
Aluminium communion cups
Did you know that every year 8.1 million tonnes of plastic enters our oceans every year from coastal regions? That’s the equivalent of 5 grocery bags of plastic sitting on every foot of coastline around the world. By making changes, we have taken on some new suppliers who hold sustainability and ethical sourcing as some of their key values and we have been able to have some great conversations around our options moving forward.
This is what we are doing corporately but we can also make a difference by taking individual ownership as well. You can do this by making only slight changes to your daily life. Did you know:
Pizza boxes (and other food saturated paper) and napkins/serviettes go in the greens bin.
By switching to recycled paper you can save 93L of water per box of paper produced.
What can I do?
If you have a compost bin at home and would consider taking some of our compostable waste home each week, we would be so grateful, and we would love to hear from you.
Keep your reusable cup on you, keep it in your car, ready for that spontaneous coffee stop.
Take reusable bags to the supermarket, refuse surplus packaging (plastic bags or bags in general). Available here.
Download the ‘CCC Bins’ app to find out what goes which bin.
Receipts printed on thermal paper go in the red bin – so when asked for a receipt at the supermarket – you could say “no thank you”
Take a break from your busy workday and watch this short video! Created by the coolest 93-year old (Sir David Attenborough), he gives a great overview of our beautiful planet, and some of the things we are doing that are destroying it. But there is hope - throughout history, humans have solved complex problems - and restoring our planet is one of our next big ones.
Keen to hear your thoughts if you’ve got any feedback for us – we’re all on this journey together.
Creation Care Team
creationcare@grace.org.nz