There is a particular kind of quiet that falls over a project when its funding ends. For the Green and Healthy Frome team, that breath has been held for a while. And we are beginning to exhale.
After five years of weaving sustainable health into the everyday fabric of this Somerset market town – its GP surgeries, florists, and bicycle-laden school runs to conscientious kitchen sinks – a new chapter begins. Which makes this the right moment to ask the uncomfortable question: did any of it actually matter?
The numbers that stopped us in our tracks
Let’s start with the data. There were financial savings, of course – the potential saving of £137,920 if all 862 people handed period pant packs choose to wear them for the rest of their menstruating lives, or the £160,360 in savings generated through Healthy Homes partner Centre of Sustainability’s via support with grants and home energy improvements. But the numbers that really stop you in your tracks are the carbon figures – still being fully collated, but already striking.
Items swapped at Frome Wardrobe Collective rather than bought new, saved an estimated 111 tonnes of carbon emissions – using the EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalent calculator that’s the same as burning 123,300 pounds of coal. Carbon savings from Cycle Together’s ebike hire scheme averaged 90 tonnes across the project – the equivalent of 229,190 miles driven by an average petrol car.
But perhaps the most significant number of all: applying the ‘1,000-tonne rule’ – which holds that a person is killed for every 1,000 tonnes of fossil carbon burned – and looking at the town’s Community Consumption footprint between 2023 and 2026 across housing energy, food, travel, waste, goods and services – we saw that the total carbon emissions across the town fell from 181,284 tonnes to 151,188 tonnes. Frome’s collective behaviour change has potentially prevented approximately 30 future premature deaths caused by cliamte-related factors. And as the data comes in, it looks like these numbers are set to get higher.
Thirty lives.
From one small market town in Somerset.
Is community the greatest threat to consumerism?
Here’s a theory. The ideal consumer within our current capitalist system of endless consumption is an isolated one – someone making individual choices in a vacuum, untethered from neighbours, from place, from any sense of collective power. These atomised people are good customers. They are also easier to ignore.
Which makes a person embedded in a thriving community – who borrows rather than buys, who shares skills, who foregoes convenience in favour of buying locally, and who builds voice and agency – over-consumption is the greatest threat. Was the real work of Green and Healthy Frome not the carbon spreadsheets, but the nurturing of community itself? If so, this small town may be quietly radical.
Flowers, prescriptions and the courage to do things differently
Lex, from Flowers For Good, didn’t set out to dismantle an industry. Uncomfortable with the disconnection from seasonality and the hidden cost of imported blooms, she built a local network of growers and florists who source ethically and share and trade their flowers. The benefits go beyond bouquets – she’s gained friends, knowledge, and community support. Something you can’t order online.
Meanwhile, a group of doctors and pharmacists at Frome Medical Practice saved the NHS £280,000 by overhauling repeat prescriptions. Better care, less waste, real savings – proof that in a supportive environment, we are more powerful for both people and planet.
What connects Lex’s flowers and Frome’s prescriptions is this: both are examples of people deciding to stop sleepwalking and asking plainly, does this actually make sense? Community makes that question easier to ask. And the answer, easier to act on.
So… have we changed anything?
The honest answer is both: yes, and not yet.
The carbon data shows real, measurable progress. The stories show that mindsets are not fixed, that industries can be nudged, and that institutions can learn and work together. But system change requires this kind of work to happen not just in Frome, but in a thousand Fromes.
The funding ends. The ideas, the knowledge, the resources remain woven into the community. And a town that has spent five years building community rather than remaining a collection of individuals is, arguably, more resilient, healthier, happier and ready to face what comes next.
Meaningful change might not yet be wholesale system change – but in Frome, it is no longer hypothetical. It is happening in the figures, the flowers, the prescriptions. In the simple, stubborn, quietly radical acts of people choosing to do things differently, together.
What if real wealth lies in community, one that allows both people and planet to flourish? In time, that may be all that truly matters.
*Equivalents were found using the www.epa.gov greenhouse gas equivalent calculator.