Hotel and restaurant group Whitbread has revealed plans to open its second green Premier Inn hotel and its first low-carbon restaurant.
The launches are part of the group's Good Together corporate sustainability programme, which aims to cut carbon emissions by a quarter (26 per cent) by 2020.
Whitbread will build a environmentally-friendly, 60-bedroom Premier Inn hotel in burgess Hill, West Sussex. Scheduled to open in Autumn 2010, the hotel has been designed to deliver 70 per cent carbon and 60 per cent water savings.
It is the second 'green' Premier Inn in the UK - the first opened in Tamworth in 2008.
Adjacent to the hotel will be a 220-cover Beefeater restaurant. The restaurant will share the hotel's carbon-saving solutions, including ground-source heat pumps, rainwater harvesting, grey water recycling, heat-recovery systems, automated light controls and sun pipes.
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.
Alan Parker, CEO of Whitbread, said: "Burgess Hill's combination of high-tech environmental features and construction methods will allow us to achieve impressive results in terms of cutting carbon and conserving water. The hotel will include many of the best performing technologies pioneered at our first green hotel in Tamworth.
"Our low-carbon Beefeater restaurant at Burgess Hill is another first for Whitbread and brings us another step closer to achieving a 26 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020."
