A shopping centre has won its seventh consecutive Green Apple Environment Award.

The team at the Spinning Gate Shopping Centre in Leigh has been invited to attend an awards ceremony at Kensington Palace in London this November, after winning the award for the seventh time.

The shopping centre has had previous successes with their first International Excellence Award for Corporate Social Responsibility achievements.

The centre was also a finalist for two awards in the Wigan Business Awards.

The categories were Community Impact and Sustainable Champion.

The centre's achievements are largely due to its efforts in waste reduction and recycling.

Since 2017, the centre has diverted 100 per cent of its waste from landfill, reduced its waste volume by 38 per cent, reduced its energy consumption by 17 per cent, reduced its water consumption by 86 per cent, and recycled 232,538 kilograms of cardboard.

The centre has also recycled and donated almost 17,000 items within the past year.

This year marks the seventh award for the centre (Image: Spinning Gate Shopping Centre) Karen Cox, centre manager of Spinning Gate Shopping Centre, said: "We are incredibly proud of the centre security and cleaning team for continuing in these amazing award successes.

"Without the team, these results would simply not be possible.

"A huge thank you to each of them for their continued hard work and support.

"A huge thank you also goes to our retail partners who have joined us on our environmental journey.

"In maximising all recycling opportunities, we not only reduce our waste volume, we recycle and often repurpose, benefitting numerous charities, our community and our future too."

The centre works in partnership with local charities and CICs to maximise all opportunities for recycling.

This includes donating unused plastic coat hangers from stores, surplus stock from centre stores, wooden pallets, shopfitting equipment, and used coffee grounds for use in the Lancashire Mining Museum garden project.

The centre also encourages and invites lots of recycling opportunities available for shoppers including household batteries, printer cartridges, and pen recycling at Ryman, used postage stamps for Kicks Count charity and facilitating charity appeals for used books, CDs, and DVDs to local charity Compassion in Action.