Whitbread, the UK’s leading hotel and restaurant group, has confirmed details of its plans for its second green hotel and its first low-carbon restaurant. Burgess Hill Premier Inn, in West Sussex, represents the latest evolution in environmentally-friendly budget hotels. It follows Whitbread’s pioneering green hotel pilot in Tamworth, Staffordshire – the UK’s first green budget hotel which opened its doors to guests in December 2008.
The 60-bedroom Premier Inn at Burgess Hill, due to open in Autumn 2010, will adopt the best-performing green technologies trialled in Tamworth to deliver 70 per cent carbon and 60 per cent water savings.
Adjacent to the hotel, Whitbread will develop its first low-carbon restaurant – a 220-cover Beefeater open grill restaurant.
The investment forms part of Whitbread’s corporate sustainability programme, ‘Good Together’, which was launched in December 2009 along with a pledge to reduce carbon emissions by 26 per cent by 2020.
The Burgess Hill development will include ground-source heat pumps using the earth’s natural energy to provide heating and cooling cool as well as hot water and rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling providing 100 per cent of the hotel’s toilet water use and saving 20 per cent of the hotel’s entire water use.
As well as this the hotel will have high-efficiency thermal insulation, low-flow showerheads delivering the feel and effect of a powerful shower without the associated water loss, heat-recovery shower systems capturing and reusing energy used by the boilers.
The hotel will also feature automated light controls with intelligent sensors turning lights off when not in use and sun pipes reducing the need for artificial lighting by increasing natural light.
Both the Premier Inn hotel and Beefeater restaurant at Burgess Hill will be built using timber frame construction methods from sustainably sourced wood. Timber frame has the lowest carbon content of any commercially-available building material and its flexible design allows for high levels of insulation to achieve maximum energy efficiency.
