GREEN BUDE

HERE AT THE PINK HOUSE WE ARE PROUD TO BE TAKING STEPS TO POSITIVELY IMPACT THE PLANET. FROM ENERGY USAGE AND CARBON BALANCING, TO SUSTAINABLE SUPPLIERS AND SUPPORTING THE LOCAL ECONOMY, IT IS OUR GOAL TO ENSURE WE CONTRIBUTE POSITIVELY TO A GREENER BUDE AND THE BEAUTIFUL CORNISH LANDSCAPE.

A huge draw when we purchased The Pink House as a holiday home was the sustainable design. From energy efficient Polarwall through to its green roof, we wanted to build on these foundations to operate with a conscious ethos. Through my day job in travel, I’ve been working with the team at The Conscious Travel Foundation, a group of likeminded founders and business owners uniting to ensure travel is a force for good to share ideas and inspire change. Tourism, like sustainability, is complicated for communities it impacts, and the environment. For the UK and Cornwall, recent events only make it a hotter topic as more people holiday ‘at home’.

Which is why it is so inspiring that A Greener Bude has united eco-conscious groups from beach cleaning, ReFILL water campaigners, plastic-free groups, Cornwall Wildlife Trust, Tourism Declares and more, with the aim of becoming the greenest town in the UK. Bude was a pioneer in the ReFILL shop and more recently The Mindful Market launched, a testament to how many local independents are committed; from Bees Vegan Bakery to Rooted Ocean – it shows that being sustainable isn’t a compromise on cool.

Rooted Ocean

So, what are we doing at The Pink House? First things first, we checked our Carbon Footprint with a review from the brilliant Ecollective. The UK average hotel carbon footprint per room per night is 15.7kg CO2e and our footprint came in at 8.3kg CO2e. As Charlie from Ecollective says “Comparatively against the world, this is a very low score. One night in a Dubai hotel is 99kg of CO2e”. We also learnt we needed to review our laundry, and our gas consumption to improve on this score for next year. When you look at Cornwall’s carbon emissions, 22% comes from homes, so it makes sense to make this kind of review. To put this into perspective, the carbon footprint per night of the entire house has the same carbon footprint as:

• 1/5 of a tree

• 94 beers

• Driving 201 miles

In response, we have also carbon balanced our total emissions with the World Land Trust to fund the protection of forests. Anyone can calculate their personal, home or business footprint online, when giving money to an offsetting company, they will channel those funds into projects such as green energy, innovation and reforestation and the projects will reduce or prevent that one tonne of carbon in the atmosphere.

As for small things within The Pink House, we’ve made sustainable choices including an electricity source on the driveway for electric cars, re-fillable glass bottles using Ecover products, high-quality Zuma Jay bodyboards that can be used for seasons to come (and not discarded into the oceans), stocking re-usable shopping bags to discourage plastic bags from supermarkets, to providing the best local products including Origin Coffee (b-corp certified) to collaborating with the awesome Electric Bakery.

Whilst they’re small steps to be more conscious, the more we talk about sustainability (in all its guises) the easier it becomes to understand what we can all do to make positive changes where we can.