Whitbread makes Green Pledges

While world leaders debate the right response to climate change, UK leisure company Whitbread has established its environmental credentials with the award of the Carbon Trust Certificate and the announcement of its aim to reduce carbon emissions by 26% by 2020.

The hotel and restaurant group has announced the following targets:

• 80% of waste diverted from landfill from Whitbread Hotels & Restaurants sites by February 2012

• 100% of all Costa Coffee production to be Rainforest Alliance certified by June 2010

• A purpose built ‘green hotel and restaurant' at Burgess Hill, West Sussex (to open in Autumn 2010)

• 3,000 qualifications from Whitbread Hotels & Restaurant Apprenticeship scheme. 400 Costa learners trained by the end of 2011

• Raise £1 million for WaterAid

• Enable 15,000 children to be educated as part of the Costa Foundation.

Whitbread is holding a Good Together Week in January, which will include customers and will focus on how positive differences can be made. Good Together is the umbrella term for Whitbread’s initiatives and aim to drive sustainable performance and ‘deepen corporate responsibility’. Alan Parker, CEO of the company, describes Good Together as a way of making a genuine difference, by harnessing the “power and potential of our people, customers and suppliers”.

Harry Morrison, General Manager Carbon Trust Standard, congratulated Whitbread upon being certified with the Carbon Trust Standard, which recognises that a company has taken genuine action to reduce its impact on climate change. Whitbread was helped towards securing the certificate by its announcement that, between 2007 and 2009, it improved its carbon efficiency by 4%.

In Copenhagen, the debate is concentrated around the aim of keeping global warming to under 2 Degrees Celsius, with an accompanying 50% emission cut by 2050, compared with 1990 levels. Whitbread’s commitment to environmental policies may also be said to be wisely pre-empting any compulsory obligations on business, which could result from formalised inter-governmental agreements.

10 December 2009