Whitbread announces eco hotel and restaurant as part of wider green strategy
Peta Hodge
13th January 2010
Hotel and restaurant group Whitbread has announced that it is to build its second environmentally-friendly budget hotel and its first low carbon restaurant at Burgess Hill in West Sussex.
The 60-bedroom Premier Inn and 220-cover Beefeater open grill restaurant, due to open this autumn, will adopt the best-performing green technologies trialled in the company’s pilot green hotel, which opened in Tamworth, Staffordshire in December 2008.
Heating at Burgess Hill will be provided by ground-source heat pumps, which will also be used to heat and cool the development’s water – 20 per cent of which will be provided from rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling.
The development will also benefit from high-efficiency thermal insulation and heat-recovery shower systems, which will capture and reuse energy used by the boilers. Sun pipes will be used to increase the natural light and reduce the need for artificial lighting.
Other energy efficiency features of the new development – which will be built using timber frame construction methods from sustainably sourced wood – include low-flow showerheads and automated light controls with intelligent sensors to turn off lights when not in use.
A spokesperson suggested the Burgess Hill Premier Inn would be part of a process of greening the company’s hotels.
“We are moving this concept forward,” he said. “We started with Tamworth, we’ve evolved that now into Burgess Hill, we hope that this will again give us more data about how these technologies work, and then there’s the potential to look at a broader roll-out.
“We’ve got over 580 hotels in the UK and we’re not saying that every one of them will be built in the same way as Burgess Hill, but what we are hoping to achieve is a corporate carbon reduction target of 26 per cent by 2020.
“What we estimate is that we can learn again from Burgess Hill and roll out some of the technologies that have worked there into other hotels where we are doing refurbishment work or into our new-build hotels.”
As well as setting its carbon reduction target of 26 per cent by 2020, Whitbread's corporate sustainability strategy, launched last December, commits the company to ensure 80 per cent of waste from its hotel and restaurants sites is diverted from landfill by February 2012.
The company has also said that 100 per cent of Costa Coffee production will be Rainforest Alliance certified by June this year.