Organisation: Park Regis Birmingham, 160 Broad Street, Five Ways, Birmingham, B15 1DT
Park Regis Birmingham is in a city centre location just a few minutes’ walk from Five Ways train station and the Library of Birmingham, and ten minutes’ walk from Birmingham New Street. Park Regis Birmingham have implemented numerous measures to improve our sustainability.
We have removed single use plastics from our meeting rooms and use branded glass bottles only with a water filter machine onsite.
We have two cardboard balers to help compact cardboard waste. This reduces the amount of refuse collections and saves on diesel emissions greatly.
We have switched our in-room amenities supplier to Rituals who have strong environmental credentials and are B-Corp Certified. By making this change we anticipate to save on 230,000 bottles of toiletries being sent to waste due to the refill system provided.
In terms of guest experience we have now changed all takeaway cups and boxes to biodegradable materials and use ceramic plates and mugs where possible, again to limit waste.
We have also moved our car park to ticketless to reduce to paper waste that used to accumulate on daily basis.
The local tram service operates directly outside the hotel and provide this information to all guests in their pre-arrival emails to encourage the use of public transport which has multi benefits.
Our energy saving initiatives include:
- We have a reduced our gas usage by 15% between the end of October 2022 and mid-January 2023. This reduction has been achieved through behavioural changes from kitchen team members such as only turning on two gas burners rather than the habitual method of lighting the whole cooker.
- We now issue one keycard to single occupancy rooms and will only give two out on request for double occupancy. This prevents guests leaving keycards in rooms and using air conditioning when they are not in the bedrooms
- We turn off air conditioning automatically from the main control panel at reception in all rooms at 11:00 (check out) and 01:00 (sleep time) to save on unnecessary usage. This can be manually turned on by guests in the rooms if they desire.
- We have changed the temperature range that guests can achieve reducing this from 18oC - 32oC to 19oC and 26oC. Again, we can override this on the main panel if guests request this.
- Housekeeping staff leave all light switches in the ‘off’ position so that when the guest enters the room and puts a keycard into the electricity slot it will not automatically turn on the lights. Lights are manually turned on by guests. Checks are made to ensure that keycards are not left in electricity slots after rooms have been cleaned.
- We use Gen 4 ice machines in our function kitchens. These are turned off at 07:00 and back on at midnight as electricity is cheaper at night the ice remains frozen for the day.
- Function kitchen fridges and freezers are turned off and only turned on 18 hours before a large event although if we can use main kitchen fridges for functions we do so.
Our future plans
The next project is to challenge the procurement team to ensure 75% of hotel approved suppliers are from within a 40 mile radius.
