NEWS that community green grocer, A Small Good Thing, is inline for a BBC Radio Four Food and Farming Award is a ringing endorsement of the store and the town’s growing green credentials.

The shop opened in Smithills in 2017 and is one of a growing handful of zero waste outlets around Greater Manchester.

Success for the shop exemplifies the reality that more and more people are becoming engaged with environmental issues and are keen to cut down on their own carbon footprint.

This trend has been steadily gaining ever greater momentum, but in recent months has been galvanised in the public consciousness by the work of David Attenborough and recent BBC and Netflix series such as Blue Planet II and Our Planet ­— highlighting the desperate plight of our planet and its wildlife.

Over the last week or so this upsurge in engagement and anger at a lack of action has become plainly evident as the environmental resistance movement Extinction Rebellion has swept over the UK and the globe.

Yesterday also saw the inspirational 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thurnberg deliver a drastic call to action in a speech to Parliament, where she told MPs that the future of her generation has been “stolen”.

With this we should all take inspiration from the shop’s name, which reminds us that making small changes can do a lot of good.