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Hotels need to prepare for
tomorrow’s higher electricity
bills by saving energy today,
warns Ville Valorinta, CEO and
Founder of Ecompter, a provider
of carbon footprint calculation
and sustainability services to the
hotel industry.
He said: “According to data
gathered from Ecompter’s customers, at
present energy prices, the average hotel
spends approximately £1,000 per room
on electricity each year. These costs are
set to spiral and put a further squeeze on
hotel profits as energy prices continue to
increase across the country.”
He added: “Hotels should be thinking right now about their
energy consumption levels and encouraging guests to make
sustainable choices during their stay. Ecompter offers hotels
a CO2 calculator they can feature online so their guests are
encouraged to reduce their energy consumption with useful
suggestions about how to do so, such as choosing to shower
rather than having a bath, or remembering to turn the lights
and air conditioning off when leaving their rooms.”
Ville advises hotel management to take the same approach
with hotel staff.
He said: “The simple fact is hotel policies alone, however
well intentioned, are not going to bring about the kind
of changes in energy use needed to cut costs, improve
profitability and have a positive effect on the environment.
Hotels can only achieve this by working in partnership with
their guests and their staff.”
Ecompter’s CO2 management and reporting services are
based on the hotel industry’s agreed common method for
measuring and communicating carbon emissions, the Hotel
Carbon Measurement Initiative (HCMI).
www.ecompter.com
James Cropper cures caffeine hangover
10 recycling fast facts
The UK’s addiction to high street
coffee has a big hangover in the form
of an estimated 2.5 billion disposable
paper cups that are sent to landfill
each year.
Now a recycling process has been
developed that will allow disposable cups
to be recycled and turned into high grade
paper. Previously, this was not possible
due to a thin layer of plastic on the inside
of the cups.
The new method developed by paper
manufacturer James Cropper separates
plastic from paper pulp allowing both
elements to be recycled.
Cup waste is softened in a warmed
solution until the coating comes apart
from the fibre. The plastic is then
skimmed off, pulverised and recycled.
The remaining material is filtered for
impurities, leaving high grade pulp
suitable for use in luxury papers and
packaging materials.
www.cropper.com
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In the last 10 years, local authority
recycling schemes have collected £2.4
billion worth of materials like paper and
card (£1 billion), plastic (£339 million),
cans (£174 million), glass (£153 million)
and textiles (£124 million).
n
Household recycling has risen from 11%
in 2001 to 43% in 2013. More than half
of business waste is now recycled.
n
More than 9 billion drinks cans are
made in the UK every year – 80% are
aluminium. In one year, a single drinks
can can be recycled as many as eight
times, saving enough energy to make
160 new cans.
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Over 3 billion cans are recycled in the
UK each year – equivalent to the weight
of 18,000 double-decker buses.
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All steel cans contain up to 25%
recycled steel.
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In the last 10 years, the UK has recycled
50 billion plastic drinks bottles –
enough, laid end-to-end, to stretch to
the moon and back more than 10 times!
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Recycled plastic bottles can be turned
into all kinds of things – even fleece
jackets! It takes 25 recycled drinks
bottles to make a fleece jacket.
n
It takes 75% less energy to make a
plastic bottle from recycled plastic than
‘virgin’ materials.
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In the UK, we send 700,000 tonnes
of clothing to be recycled each year –
enough to fill 459 Olympic swimming
pools – but still £140m worth of used
clothing ends up in landfill.
n
Aerosols and foil are the two materials
that the greatest proportion of people
throw away due to a lack of awareness
that they are included in council’s
kerbside recycling collections.
For more recycling facts and figures
go to www.wrap.org.uk
Enjoy your stay, but
don’t leave the lights on
A 21-metre living wall on the side of the ‘Rubens at the Palace
Hotel’ is set to become a major attraction on the walk from
Victoria station to Buckingham Palace, London. Designed to
bloom all year round, it is packed with more than 20 seasonal
plant species including buttercups, crocuses, strawberries, spring
bulbs and winter geraniums. Green walls have many benefits:
they improve air quality by trapping microscopic pollutants;
deaden noise; keep buildings cooler in the summer and warmer
in winter; and, it is claimed, even reduce the risk of flooding.
Dedicated storage tanks in the living wall at the ‘Rubens at the
Palace Hotel’ can capture 10,000 litres of rainwater from the
hotel’s roof.
Paper before plastic
Mondi has launched a campaign to encourage
greater use of biodegradable, recyclable paper
shopping bags, following research showing that
only 2% of consumers in Germany and Italy
and 0.5% of people in Spain choose paper bags
when grocery shopping.
Clemens Stockreiter, COO of Mondi Kraft Paper
Europe & International, said: “The raw material in Mondi kraft paper-based bags
comes from responsibly managed forests. Our kraft paper can be recycled up
to seven times and is suitable for industrial composting. If a paper-based bag is
thrown away, it will naturally biodegrade.”
www.paperforbags.com
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According toWRAP, supermarket customers in the UK used 8.1 billion single-
use plastic bags in 2012. This is 1.3% more than in 2011 but 34% less than in
2006 when reporting began.
James Cropper’s new recycling facility at
its Lake District HQ.