The Belfry

Organisation: The Belfry Hotel & Resort, Wishaw, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands. B76 9PR.
 

Surrounded by 550 acres of rolling countryside, with over 780 team members, 300 bedrooms, four bars and restaurants, and three golf courses, The Belfry is one of the largest hospitality venues within the Midlands. With this, we have a responsibility to the local community, our guests, our colleagues, and our surroundings to ensure we are committed to caring about our social and environmental impact. We have a duty to not only the people associated with the resort but the environment and the wildlife that have chosen our grounds as their home.

We’re only at the beginning of our journey, but it’s a journey of continuous improvement. From our charity initiatives and waste management, to our golf course maintenance and biodiversity, we’re striving to make The Belfry a more socially and environmentally responsible place every single day. Our initiatives include:

• ESG Champions: Our in-house ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) Champions team comprises of members from all departments who have a keen interest in sustainability and green initiatives. The team meets monthly to review, agree and communicate on projects that improve our social and environmental responsibility.

• Water Management: Our Resort benefits from a waste to water management system. This enables us to clean any wastewater used across the resort and either filter this out to one of our reservoirs or lakes or spray directly onto our golf courses. In 2022, we also introduced waterless urinals which reduces our water usage and, by implication, our site's carbon footprint.

• Nature and Biodiversity: We apply a huge focus on encouraging and nurturing wildlife on our property, encouraging populations of bees (through onsite hives) and a huge variety of birds, bats, owls, otters, snakes and more. Our Greenkeeping team use our existing greens to produce up to 1000sqft of new turf within our ‘Turf Nursery’. Using all products that have been grown on site enables us to cut down our carbon footprint.

• Sustainable Transport: We currently have six electric vehicle charging points on site with plans to increase to over 80. We have introduced electric vehicles, including electric golf buggies, across our resort and plan to continue adding more with a long term-plan to phase out use of combustion engine vehicles.

• Energy Management: Approximately 80% of our lighting is now LED with many areas being covered by motion sensor lights. We have installed smart thermostatic radiator valves in 187 bedrooms across our Resort.

• Marketing: All our promotional banners and pull up banners are now biodegradable or reusable.  No more single use plastic banners, and no more landfill.

Results
 

In short, we have saved a massive 3 million kWh of energy combined across electricity and gas when comparing 2022 to 2019! For some perspective, that is enough electricity to power 300 houses and enough gas to heat 200 houses for a full year!

Since installing smart thermostatic radiator valves, which allows us to reduce our energy consumption by controlling the heat in each individual room, we saw a 64% reduction in heat energy usage.

Stairway lighting upgrades for new LED fittings with sensors that dim to 20% output when no motion is detected resulting in an approx. annual reduction of 12,000-24,000 kWh.

The ESG Champions team are making huge steps towards gaining an improved Green Tourism (currently awarded bronze level) and GEO accreditation in 2023. The team has replaced plastic and polystyrene cups in the staff canteen, they are making more processes paperless, introduced daily vegan options in the staff canteen and so much more.

A huge focus for the team is to better communicate all of the fantastic things that we already do, and plan to do – both internally and externally to our clients and guests. We want sustainability to be at the forefront of our daily actions and also with our guests.

Our future plans
 

We have big plans for The Belfry! Site developments are in discussion with an emphasis on ESG. We are researching solar panels, increasing the number of electronic vehicle charging points, improved accessibility, segregating waste, improved employee training and more.

An exciting new job role, ESG Coordinator, has been approved for 2023. This will give us the opportunity to give an even greater focus to this incredibly important topic.

We have recently added a new question to our post-stay guest survey as we are keen to listen to our guests feedback and ideas. As of January 2023, we now ask guests “What do you think The Belfry could do to help protect the environment?”

We also include a PDF with some helpful tips on how to be a responsible Belfry visitor to our guests pre-stay email which is issued three days prior to arrival.

Recognition
 

We were proud to receive the Bronze Award from Green Tourism in 2019. Unfortunately, Covid delayed many of our ESG related plans for 2020 and beyond. During 2022, multiple initiatives were introduced and with so many exciting plans for the future, we are confident that we can secure an improved Green Tourism rating in 2023. We are also close to submitting an application for GEO accreditation. The GEO Foundation for Sustainable Golf is an international not-for-profit, founded sixteen years ago to help inspire, support, and reward credible sustainability action and to strengthen and promote golf's social and environmental value.

Our commitments

• We pledge to meet monthly to seek ways of being more socially and environmentally sustainable.

• We are working towards net zero carbon by 2030.

• We pledge to seek and act on feedback from our guests regarding improving our sustainability practices.

• We pledge to ensure that the resort is a supportive, inclusive and healthy environment for our guests and employees to dine, sleep, play, relax and work.

• We pledge to encourage and nurture wildlife on the grounds of the resort and to protect and their natural habitats.