We’re working super hard on our Low Carbon Pledge!
The Low Carbon Steering Committee is working hard across all aspects of the business and we’re making some great progress. Areas of focus at the moment include taking steps to reduce single use plastic in the hotels and look for more sustainable solutions in all areas of our operations and construction.
Plastic pollution takes hundreds of years to break down and causes damages to our waterways and land. It is also a major source of carbon emissions from its production, manufacture, and disposal. Because of our operating model we are already using less single use plastic than other operators, but we want to reduce this as much as we possibly can. One of our major single use plastic elements is our Key Cards, so we are in the process of rolling out wooden key cards in some hotels during March. Currently we use up to 3000 plastic key cards a year in each hotel. These will gradually be phased out and replaced with the wooden alternative across all hotels in the coming months and removing plastic key cards from easyHotel altogether.
We are also working with our Housekeeping partners to remove the plastic bin liners from our bathrooms and replace these with biodegradable alternatives – Barcelona is the first hotel which has already implemented biodegradable bin bags. Nice and Aubervilliers will be next in March, followed by Benelux hotels in Q3. The UK are currently even testing another alternative by removing completely the bin bags in all the hotels. (results will be assessed in March).
Another important aspect of our energy usage is our In-room Heating and Cooling systems. We have implemented an initiative across all hotels where all heating and cooling systems are being set to automatically shut off every hour between 9am and 6pm. We are hoping that this will significantly reduce the energy consumed by these units by ensuring they are not running unnecessarily in empty rooms. We will be monitoring our consumption during 2023. The Marketing and Operations teams have been working to make sure we communicate this effectively to our guests so that they understand why we’re doing this, so that we are taking our guests on our Low Carbon Journey as well.
Finally, we are launching a new design for our key card holder, which will use 50% less cardboard, as we continue to focus on using fewer resources and making more sustainable choices.
On the construction side, we are working with the BREEAM framework to assess our new properties for sustainable construction. Dublin is expected to achieve BREEAM accreditation for sustainable construction and Aubervilliers has already achieved a ‘Very Good’ rating, which is a fantastic achievement and sets the benchmark for future construction projects.
Our colleagues in the Netherlands and Belgium have done some fantastic work on sustainability and Low Carbon during the past year within the Green Globe scheme. All of their hotels have achieved a Sustainability accreditation under Green Globe thanks to their hard work which provides a great foundation to move forward with the Low Carbon Pledge. We will be moving away from Green Globe in the Benelux going forward as we combine our efforts under one team and work together towards our ambitious objective to become the leader in low-cost, low-carbon hotels throughout Europe and the UK.
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