A council’s new pavement cleaning machine may help to reduce the use of harmful chemicals in the borough’s green spaces.
The Beds and Bugs Project update presented to the Climate Change Committee on Monday (7 February) said that Bedford Borough Council has committed to reducing the amount of chemical usage in Addison Howard Park and Bedford Park.
This led Cllr Sue Oliver (Labour, Kempston North Ward) to ask what is happening with chemical use in other green spaces in the borough.
Paul Pace, chief officer for environment at the council, said that the council is trying to reduce the use of chemicals where it can.
“We’ve decided to take those parks and a couple of other parks as trials to see how we get on, to see how the public accept it as well,” he said.
“We’re doing a bit of a study at the moment looking at different options of how we can actually still maintain the parks and cutting around trees and other obstacles.
“We only tend to use spot spraying where we absolutely need to, the guys don’t go out there and spray everything and it’s only certain types of chemicals that we use that are the most effective and efficient.”
Mr Pace said that the council gets marked on chemical use when being assessed for Green Flag Award status.
Guidance from the Green Flag Award scheme says that pesticides should not be used, or their use should at least be reduced to a minimum as part of an
integrated pest management approach, on any Green Flag Award sites.
It adds that if pesticides and fertilisers continue to be used on-site there must be a justification for doing so.
“But we’re also trialling and looking to see what other people are doing out there in the marketplace, trying new techniques,” Mr Pace said.
“We belong to a lot of different organisations, so it’s a sharing of information between different councils to see what does work.
“If someone’s tried and tested something and it works well, we adopt that. If it doesn’t, then we won’t go down that line.
“I’d like to be able to say ‘we’re not using anything’, but that’s a complete lie because we still need some chemicals to manage some areas, like tennis courts and stuff like that.
“We spray an algaecide or fungicide on there to control the algae, etc.
“We’ve bought a new pavement washing machine and that’s extremely effective on pavements, but we’ve also done some trials on the tennis courts as well.
“So that may be an area where we can actually reduce the chemical uses with a different type of cleaning or maintenance regime going forward,” he said.
Cllr Lucy Bywater (Green, Castle Ward) said the Pesticide Action Network has examples of what other councils have tried and what has or hasn’t worked.
“It’s really important because we are in a global ecological crisis as well as a climate crisis and the two are sort of interlinked as we know,” she said.
“A lot of gardeners now are shunning chemical use and have been for years and I think people are very receptive [to this]
“The council can lead by example and say ‘this is where we have reduced chemical use and this is what it looks like now because of that’,” she said.
Bedford mayor, Dave Hodgson said: “There is a different scale between people being able to kneel down and weed their gardens.
“It’s a little bit more difficult when you have to do it at scale, so I wouldn’t like to wander around on my knees weeding Bedford Park.”
by John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
