The Environment
The Center Parcs experience is built around enabling our guests to enjoy the natural environment. It therefore makes sense for us to protect it. We felt it was essential to identify where we had the biggest environmental impact and to focus on making our footprint in these areas as small as possible. We identified three areas in which we needed to reduce our footprint: our energy use, our waste production and our water use.
As part of our recent villa refurbishment programme we installed a range of environmentally efficient technology. This included water saving devices, energy efficient light bulbs and intelligent thermostats. Across our villages we’ve also updated our building energy management systems, installed energy meters and implemented variable speed water pumps in two of our villages. Together these measures have reduced our energy usage by approximately 13% and our water usage by 14%.
Making a number of changes to our transport policy has also resulted in significant energy savings. We replaced 25% of our village vehicle fleet with electric vans and all of our existing diesel engine fleet with efficient E4 rated engines. We also encourage video conferencing where possible and provide incentives for our staff to car share. Overall these measures resulted in an impressive 8.5% year on year reduction in CO2 emissions equating to a reduction of 176.25 tonnes of CO2.
Reducing our reliance on landfill remains a key priority for Center Parcs and we have made significant advances in this respect. New recycling facilities, infrastructure and processes have been introduced meaning that we now recycle more items than ever. Guests are encouraged to recycle during their holiday through the presence of recycling points across each village. Large amounts of surplus furniture and other equipment were generated when we undertook our recent villa upgrading programme, the majority of which was donated to charities within the local community around each village. In the last year we have also replaced our entire bike fleet, with a large proportion of old bikes being sent away to be refurbished and distributed to charities around the world. We have set ourselves challenging recycling targets for 2009, we hope to achieve this by increasing the number of waste items we are able to recycle and, wherever possible, sourcing new products that are recyclable.
As a result of these, and many other measures, we have recently been reaccredited with IS014001 for our environmental management system.
