Gloucestershire Archives’ Green Pledge Project

Gloucestershire Archives gathers, keeps and shares local authority and community archives of Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire.  We are located at Gloucestershire Heritage Hub in Gloucester with local heritage charities. 

Our ‘Green Pledge Project’ running from October 2023 to November 2025, takes a holistic ‘green’ approach aiming to reduce our environmental footprint, catalogue environmental archives, train staff and a new archives apprentice, co-create green themed activities and exhibitions, provide volunteer opportunities and run a public pledge campaign. It is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Dynamic Collections scheme. Supplementary funding from Salix has been used to install solar panels

Collections and communities

So far, we’ve catalogued and packaged over 9000 environmental records, rationalised our map storage, proactively collected new ‘green’ records and created podcasts documenting the significant role Gloucestershire people and organisations have played in environmental matters.

We’re planning a flooding workshop for water professionals, whilst digital copies of orchard records have been sent to those working with endangered species in Kent and we’ve let meteorologists working on climate change models know about our historic weather records. 

Through a major outreach and travelling exhibition programme, we’re getting more people engaged with climate issues and making green pledges across Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire. 

Getting our house in order: a holistic approach to ‘greening’ our service

In order to ‘get our own house’ in order, we’ve carried out periodic waste audits significantly reducing our waste, used Julie’s Bicycle online climate tools to measure our reducing power usage (see below), co-created a green action plan for our service with staff and partners, conducted a biodiversity audit, encouraged cycling in the ‘Love to Ride’ scheme, contacted suppliers about their green credentials and tried to ‘think green’ in our procurement decisions, introduced lunchtime walks to recycle soft plastics, and set aside time to reduce our digital footprint (filing and emails) by 80%. We have great allies in the Council’s sustainability team and climate emergency group.  We’ve used staff and partner training (carbon literacy and Climate Fresk), conference papers, hosting a workshop for conservators and archivists on shutting down heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), and case studies to help promote carbon reduction. 

Building and community garden

Before the Green Pledge Project, we started from a good base with mostly passive strongrooms since the 1990s, a beautiful community garden developed by archives staff (in a voluntary capacity) and Cotswolds Gardening School students in 2019, and all our lights had been replaced with LEDs in 2022/23. 

During the project, we’ve overseen the removal of air conditioning from remaining strongrooms and the replacement of faulty cooling equipment for our photographic store with a low-cost, low-energy unit (like those used for wine cellars).  Significant arrays of solar panels have been installed on three roofs (providing shade to keep strongroom temperatures lower in the summer and enabling us to avoid the consequences of a prolonged local power cut). All this work will further reduce our power consumption significantly.  We’re about to install a domestic-scale solution to dehumidification across eight strongrooms saving staff time as well as energy. 

In our community garden, we welcomed two charities, Project Grow and the feeding charity, Wiggly.  Project Grow have transformed our space into a productive market garden whilst Wiggly use the produce in their education programme for all focuses on nutrition, food and cooking skills for life.  We’re delighted that volunteering in our garden is proving life-changing for some of our volunteers, including one person who now feels able to leave his house and is seeking employment.  The project has now been extended to the Bishop of Gloucester’s garden and Kingsholm Primary School.  Led by Project Grow, the Green Pledge team and other partners created a stunning ‘Food for Thought’ installation at Cheltenham Science Festival in June 2025. In the first two days alone, over 1600 school children took part in activities about sustainable growing with many inspired to make environmental pledges.

Key lessons

• Knowing your current environmental impact is an important starting point, and what you measure tends to gets done.  

• Working with Nick Grant from Environmental Solutions who uses low-cost, low-energy Passivhaus principles, alongside our council property colleagues, has been transformational in terms of reducing our carbon footprint. 

• Archives and archivists can make a difference to both raising awareness and demonstrating impact in the environmental arena.

• Working in partnership is invaluable.  It may take slightly longer but the impact is greater.  Examples here include our community garden work with local charities and organisations, most of our learning and engagement activities (where we’ve found it more effective using other people’s audiences and publicity machines rather than trying to generate our own), and commissioning artists to bring our material and messages to life. 

• Appointing dynamic project staff well connected to environmental organisations has greatly enhanced our project’s impact and success with dynamic collecting.  We will use this approach again when proactively addressing gaps in our collecting policy.

What next?

We’re working through remaining areas of our green action plan and currently exploring options to ‘green’ our car park, install EV charging points, and reduce use of mains water (primarily using grey water to flush the toilets), supplementing the water butts already installed for watering the community garden. In due course, as they approach the end of their life, we plan to replace our 50-year-old gas fired boilers with air source heat pumps.

There is further work to do understanding the environmental impact of digital record keeping and e-preservation.

We will be particularly pleased if any of our ideas inspire others, just as others have inspired us. We continue to update our ‘Green pledge’ website as the project progresses:  https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/our-projects/the-green-pledge-project/. 

Heather Forbes, Head of Archives, heather.forbes@gloucestershire.gov.uk