Having been a part of the Perthshire community for over 150 years, we’re proud to support a number of projects close to our heart and home. Our sustainability journey started back in 2008 and since then we’ve gone on to achieve the Green Tourism Gold Award in 2017. To achieve this, we’ve implemented a variety of energy efficient measures including installing LED lights across the hotel and self-catering, installing new boilers and dual flushing toilets and flow restrictions. Having our own wells on the estate also greatly contributes to our water usage.
Crieff and Perthshire are our home so we’ve made it one of our missions to help protect it by reducing what we send to landfill as much as we can. Whether it be by donating beds and duvets to children’s homes, ironing boards to schools for textiles classes or kitchen equipment to help the homeless in their first homes. We’ve also teamed up with local charity, Remake, who collect an array of our bedroom and self-catering furniture during refurbishments to give it a new lease of life and sell on for good causes.
It’s not just the hotel itself that are passionate about recycling, our team are as well. Dave, the head Gardener and his team are often found upcycling wooden pallets into log wood stores, planters or even a mobile bar for our Christmas party nights.
Not only is our team who we encourage, it’s our guests as well. Since 2016, we’ve teamed up with the Big Tree Country to encourage our guests to donate £1 on check out to help preserve our beautiful location.
When it comes to waste, if we can save and recycle it, we will. Back in 2016, we teamed up with Mary’s Meals in Dunblane to recycle used soap bars – after being sanitised and processed, they are shipped off to countries where sanitation is a problem. So far, approximately 508kg of used soap has been diverted from landfill and put to good causes. And it’s not just soap, our paper and food have also been reviewed with guests just getting one copy of the paper bill instead of two and an ongoing food waste program.
With technology changing all the time, we’re keen to stay astride and so have recently had 2 dual outlet EV electric car charging points installed in our Melville Car Park. And our sustainable journey doesn’t’ stop there. Currently Alexandra MacDonald, our welfare and environment manager, is working on reviewing the waste management contracts and as well replacing the old combined heat and power systems used so we can continue to help preserve Crieff, Perthshire and Scotland.