Whitbread was named winner of the ASDA Environmental Leadership Award at Business in the Community’s 2016 Annual Responsible Business Gala in London last week.
The event at the O2 arena was the culmination of the 2016 Responsible Business Awards, run by The Prince of Wales’s charity Business in the Community to celebrate the innovative ways that businesses in the UK and abroad are making a sustained difference and transforming communities.
Whitbread’s award winning initiative with an innovative approach to integrating sustainable technologies and construction techniques in the design and build of the Costa Eco-Pod and hub by Premier Inn, St Martin’s Lane, has delivered outstanding results. hub by Premier Inn is the first hotel in the world to achieve the BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating and the Costa Eco-Pod is the UK’s first zero energy retail unit.
The pioneering sustainability efforts of both Premier Inn and Costa are tackling climate change and saving energy through these two trail-blazing environmental projects. hub by Premier Inn on St. Martin’s Lane in London has achieved 40% less water usage and 30% less energy usage than building regulations require, whilst 100% renewable energy supplies the site. The Costa Eco-Pod in Telford achieves neutral energy consumption, with renewable energy created on site balancing out the cost of energy consumed. Both models are replicable at scale and are great testing grounds for pushing innovation and seeing what can be done by combining technologies together.
