Marple Community Fire Station

Honey available to Marple Communities

2014 GREEN Hose finalists at Marple are offering their local community honey that has been produced on station.

Firefighters based at Marple Fire Station have supplied the local health food shop on Stockport Road with honey making it available to members of our community to buy. The local beekeeper used his contacts with the local shop.

A percentage of the proceeds made from each jar of honey, currently being sold as fire station honey, will go to The Fire Fighters Charity. The beehives, which are home to over 100,000 bees, have yielded around 30 pounds of honey over the summer.

GREEN Hose Award Winners in 2012

MARPLE was crowned the greenest fire station in GMFRS after winning the inaugural Green Hose Award. This 100% recycled trophy was presented to Marple Fire Station as the overall winners of the first ever 'Green Hose Awards'. 

The competition will now be run every year by Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, to find the greenest, most environmentally sound fire station from across the 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester. 

Marple's 17 fire fighters triumphed in the 2012 contest for a whole range of initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of their station. This year they've….

• Built a beehive to help protect this dying species and raise awareness. 
• Put up bat and bird boxes to improve local biodiversity. 
• Tracked their gas and electricity consumption then reduced it with advice from the Energy Saving Trust. 
• Started to compost their food waste to save it from going to landfill or incineration 
• Taken over a small plot of land at the back of the station and began planting trees 
• Been involved in community environmental projects such as the MESS Showcase 
• Got the whole station cycling to work 
• And much, much more (60+ environmental challenges)

Rob Gall (right) receives the trophy from Steve McGuirk. The trophy has been produced entirely from recycled fire service equipment, expertly crafted by local artist Adnan Bayyat, whose other works include recycled dresses for Lady Gaga! It will be on display in Marple Library, and perhaps the year after if Marple Fire Station win again!

The station beat off fierce competition from six other finalists, but the volunteer judges from Manchester City College and the City's universities judged Marple to be the greenest. Bolton Central, Bury, Chadderton, Heywood, Marple, Mossley and Moss Side all made the final and took home a hamper of locally sourced delicacies. All the firefighters at Marple have won a trip to Go Ape and the coveted Green Hose Award Trophy, which will sit proudly in their station for the next year.

Marple Firefighter, Robert Gall, said: "On behalf of the station I'd like to say thank-you very much. We've put our hearts and souls into this. "We've all worked very hard towards this award and we'd like to thank everyone who's been involved with it and Sam and Joe for organising it."

Sam Pickles, Environmental Manager, said: "This is the first time any fire service has run a competition like this and it has come about through hard work from a lot people within GMFRS. "We set about 60 challenges, things that every fire station could complete and they ranged from the straightforward like turning lights off to the truly challenging like getting a whole station to go fair trade. "All seven finalists completed every single challenge, so it was extremely close and came down to the things which made them stand out as the greenest fire station. "The prize is truly for an entire station, it's quite a gesture for Go Ape to donate something so valuable so I'd like to say a massive thank-you to them." 

County Fire Officer, Steve McGuirk, said: "From our perspective as well as the moral imperative to be as green as possible there is a hard-nosed financial reason too. "We have solar panels on the back of our headquarters and we're putting more solar panels on other buildings. "People think 'where's this money coming from I thought we were hard up?', but there is hard evidence of how investments we've made over the last few years have taken hundreds and thousands of pounds out of our existing utilities budgets." This is about hard cash savings in the here and now. "We've reduced our carbon footprint since 2009 by 16 per cent. If the rest of the economy had been on that same kind of target we would have all hit our various carbon reduction targets. "That's an indication of just how far ahead of the field GMFRS has become."

Here are some more details about the things that Marple's Firefighters have been getting up to:

http://www.manchesterfire.gov.uk/updates/news/19april2012_marple_bird_boxes.aspx

http://www.manchesterfire.gov.uk/updates/news/26october2012_marple_bees.aspx

http://www.manchesterfire.gov.uk/updates/news/31january2012_marple_lock_training.aspx