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Super-green hotel will bottle its own brand of mineral water
Sri Carmichael, Consumer Affairs Reporter22.07.09
The largest hotel ever built in London will bottle all its own water to offer guests instead of expensive mineral brands.
The final beam of the £350 million Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel was bolted into place by Mayor Boris Johnson last night at the "topping out" ceremony.
The 1,021-room riverside hotel on the South Bank, which offers uninterrupted views of the Houses of Parliament from the former site of the Greater London Council building, will be one of the greenest in the capital once it opens early next year.
The onsite water plant is expected to produce more than a million bottles of triple-filtered tap water - sparkling and still - each year, using 10,000 reusable sterilised bottles for the hotel's restaurants, mini-bars and spa.
The venture will eclipse the success of the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, which won a gold environmental award from the London Development Agency's Green Tourism programme in March for its onsite plant that reuses 400 bottles, saving £14,500 a year.
Other green features include energy-efficient lighting and roof water collection for irrigating the gardens.
Infra-red technology in the hotel rooms, staff areas and public bathrooms will ensure lights are on only when someone is in the room and all the 25,000-plus lights will use an energy-saving LED or compact fluorescent bulb. It's hoped this will make its carbon footprint 606 tonnes a year smaller than if it had used traditional lighting.
Reader views (3)
Kudos to them for taking steps that enable eco-conscious travelers to feel at ease when needing a drink! I hope when the hotel finally opens to see them on www.EnvironmentallyFriendlyHotels.com as it's a go-to resource for the green traveler, they list a hotel's green features all the way down to if they compost! I am most appreciative of the article and looking forward to hearing of their other green initiatives.
- Tanya, Washington DC US
London tap water has got to be the worst tasting water in the world. Full of chlorine and remnants of recycling, not to mention residence time in old worn out pipelines. No thank you.
As for on site filtering systems, the stripping out of naturally occuring minerals causes an imbalance in the water and not that great for putting in your body. Sure enough, there are some dubious bottled waters on the market, but there are also many more with credible purity claims.
- Peter Keane, Tourmakeady, Ireland
What's wrong with just pouring it out of the tap into a jug?
- Paul, London
