Host Café and SMA awarded at the Clean City Awards

The Oscars might have happened without our presence last Sunday, but the Clean City Awards of London sure didn´t.
And we have proof!

Host Café and Guild Church of Saint Mary Aldermary won the Clean Streets Partnership Gold Award of 2019!

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We couldn´t be more thrilled and grateful for having won this prize. But what does it mean?
The Clean City Awards Scheme, which has been running since 1994, is an annual ceremony held in Mansion House, which aims to develop partnerships with all types of City businesses by raising awareness to waste management and encouraging good environmental practises.

The winner of this prize is awarded for efforts to reduce litter around the vicinity of a site and to keep the City streets clean and litter free.

The story
Last year, we heard word that our Café and Building Manager, Lyn Schalk, had been nominated to the CCA for her endless efforts on trying to fix the littering issues of this location.
Keeping St. Mary Aldermary Church an inclusive space for everyone has been one of our core values since the start. We are proud to provide a free space for all city workers, tourists and students whether they come to have their lunch or seat down and declutter their minds from the City chaos. However, things have gotten a bit out of hand last year.

With more than 23 000 businesses in the City of London, we have experienced a blatant increase of waste from surrounding businesses (Itsu, Leon, etc…) on our Church bins. These events have forced Host Café to spend more than £250 a month in sustaining this upsurge of rubbish.

So, we took measures.
We closed our bins and directed all foreign rubbish to the only surrounding City of London bin in Watling Street. We also displayed the reason why and tried to guide our visitors on how to be better at recycling.

And this was just a fragment of what we did in 2019. We also:

  • Swapped our energy supply to Good Energy;

  • Partnered with Paper Round to improve our recycling;

  • Converted our ground coffee waste into fire logs with Bio Bean;

  • Introduced a 25p reusable cup discount;

  • Introduced a 15p paper cup charge;

  • Compromised on selling all our drinks in glass bottles

We can´t wait to share with you our plans for 2020.

In all these efforts, we received news that we had been shortlisted and consequently made it to the top six nominees. In a blink of an eye, we were incredulously traversing the halls of Mansion House and enjoying a lavish banquet. The rest… You can imagine it yourself.

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Having won this award is an immense pleasure and motivation to keep doing well for the environment. However, our efforts alone are not enough to diminish the colossal amount of litter that City businesses produce. Only with the help of our customers, suppliers and the City of London itself we will be able to tackle the issue of street waste and single-use plastics.
Rather than cleaning up streets, how can we keep them clear in the first place?

We would like to thank all the people that made this experience possible and awarded us with this prize. We are immeasurably grateful.