St Athans Hotel is the green hotel for budget travellers in central London. However, being an eco-friendly hotel means there are always more green actions we can do – just having recycled plastic bottle loft insulation is not enough. Looking ahead is always useful, and we try to do it as often as possible, though like most small businesses not nearly enough. Here is our wish list for the coming year to make us an even more sustainable B&B:
Easy wins:
- More educational signage around the hotel – explaining the eco-friendly things we already do, and also more eco-friendly things to do in the area.
- Continued work on back yard garden design – install gravity-fed reticulation system, add more edibles.
- Biodiversity – Bird feeders and boxes, wild bee hotels, bat boxes made from off-cuts of wood from our building works.
- Sole recycle bins in rooms – find duo-bins, or smaller bins, and signage on the bins themselves so people know what they can recycle. (This has been on our list for years – we’ve struggled to find one that is stylish yet doesn’t cost a fortune. If you know of one please let us know).
- Clean air plants – when we buy any new plants for indoors or outdoors we choose from a list of air purifying plants.
Require planning:
- Paperless office – getting rid of the need to print at all.
- Vertical gardens – for various external walls around the hotel (trying different types of vertical garden structure).
- More Green roofs – adding to the ones at the front of the hotel (and roofs that can’t take more weight to be covered in mats or moss).
- More hanging baskets – across the whole front of the hotel, possibly including the balconies, with automatic reticulation (watering) system in place.
- Light chimneys – for top floor public areas, office and some windowless toilets.
Long term goals:
Solar water heater – to pre-heat water going into the hot water boilers (dependent on many variables, esp. the local council)
Photovoltaic panels – for energy production (dependent on many variables, esp. the local council).