Kitchen Waste Alchemy at the Budock Vean
Cornwall's top country house hotel is starting the New Year with some startling facts and figures about its new kitchen waste composting policy - which is adding to its substantial green credentials and saving money too.
The Budock Vean, on the Helford River, has been doing some number crunching during the past two months, in which staff have managed to reduce the amount of food waste from the kitchens by a third.
Over a year this works out at 12,000kg of vegetable and fruit peelings, egg shells, tea bags, lettuce leaves, food scrapings which instead of being sent to landfill are being composted into fine, rich soil to help fertilise the hotel's sixty five acres of sub-tropical gardens and parkland.
Not only is it a more environmentally friendly option, but those scraps would have taken up 150 general waste containers which at £14 per container for removal equates to a saving of £2,100 a year.
If you only do one "green" thing this year, make it this! We were already composting our grass clippings and garden waste, but we set ourselves a challenge to really reduce the waste from our kitchens and we’ve been staggered to see that a whole third of it can be composted and put back into enriching our grounds.
We haven't used any fancy technology but we took advice on what could and couldn't be composted. Our basic, large-size compost bins will take around six months to work their magic and turn our kitchen waste into something really useful.
We're extremely pleased with these latest results. We're cutting costs in terms of waste removal and the amount of compost we buy in - and doing our bit for the planet makes us all feel better too. What's not to like?!
Martin Barlow, Owner Budock Vean
Kitchen waste composting is the latest of the Budock Vean's many, award-winning "green" initiatives which cover everything from sourcing locally and saving energy and water, to "reducing, reusing, recycling" in general.
For more information visit www.budockvean.co.uk