As part of our Sustainable St Ives project some of you may have noticed we have swapped Royal Square bunting for a sustainable, beautiful solution.

This installation is the first of its kind in Cornwall and it offers an eco-responsible solution for embellishing our beautiful town with volume and colour. Using an innovative 3D printing process the e-deco collections are developed and printed in small workshops in France. The robot enables up to three successive layers of translucent material to be drawn, for finely-detailed, luminous decors. These are not available in the UK and the company in France has the best credentials around sourcing and recycling materials (plus they are closer to us in France than shipping from most of the UK).

Leblanc illuminations who also supply lots of our Christmas lighting are an enlightened player in today’s environmental challenges, supporting our ambitions for ecological transition by offering 3D printed decorations made from biosourced, recycled and recyclable materials.

Not only are these decorations made from recycled materials but they can be recycled again when we have finished with them.

Why not bunting?

Over the past 2 years we have tried the 2 types of biodegradable bunting on the market and neither has stood up to our weather conditions so we have been looking for alternative street decoration options. E-deco is a sustainable way of producing structures which can be suspended from wires overhead much like the Christmas lighting. As it will be our first year using this we need to do a test area to see if it will withstand our weather conditions. We have chosen Royal Square for a number of reasons including the fact that it is a large space where people get dropped off (including our new cruise ship visitors), this area does not benefit from the same visitor dwell time as Fore Street and the Wharf and shop vacancy rates are rising around this area which has a detrimental effect on all businesses across town. We have also trialled a few on the corner of St Andrews Street/Street-an-Pol to see if they get noticed as single structures and how effective they are in the streets.

If the E-deco decoration is successful we will use it to replace the areas that had bunting next year but we need to do a trial first. Due to this we have increased planting and have installed new lamp post banners.

Street decoration this year additional to our usual town wide planting will be:

• E-deco decoration – Royal Square (we have also commissioned Cormac to paint the tatty lamp posts in Royal Square) and we are adding some additional summer planting to those lamp posts.
• Fore Street Planting – New planters and summer planting for the area outside of the galleries and Rolys to stop vans parking on the pavement for long periods of time. Planting on Zion Church railings and a new planter with summer planting for Cyril Noall Square.
• Large size Lamp Post Banners – Installed along the Wharf and the Terrace
• The Terrace – Additional Summer planting and plantscape units.
• Tesco roundabout – Additional Summer planting and plantscape units.