THE appeal amongst holiday makers to both enjoy their time away, but also to make sure that their impact on the environment is kept to a minimum, is proving increasingly important.
With this in mind there are a growing number of gite owners in France making their facilities ‘green’ not only to cut back on waste, but also as a way to appeal to people looking to take a holiday that respects the environment.
Graeme and Graziella Swan (pictured below) have worked to reduce the carbon footprint of their three gites in the Poitou Charentes, Les Cygnes, and here they outline some of the steps they’ve taken, Graeme writes:
There are many reasons for going green and you don’t have to be an eco-mentalist to want to do it.
At Les Cygnes Gites we decided to because we believe that if the human race has altered our environment for the worse every little bit helps.
It is easy to apply, the top 10:
1. Turn off electrical appliances not just standby – in the UK 400,000 houses could be run each year on the energy saved by turning off equipment, and it produces over 240,000 tonnes of CO2.
2. Use A rated white goods such as fridge, freezers etc. Not only will you produce less CO2 you will save money on electricity bills.
3. Use low wattage light bulbs again you will save both money and CO2 and they last around 8 times as long as normal bulbs. They don’t need to be expensive our local supermarket sells them for around 2.50€.
4. Recycle all you can – recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W light bulb for up to 6 hours.
5. Compost all you can not only will you get fantastic fertilizer but you won’t have to buy fertilizer which often contains harsh chemicals.
6. Buy and install a water butt fed from your guttering free chemical free water for your garden. If you can recuperate rainwater for flushing your loos. A millimetre of rain on one square metre of surface yields one litre of water – so a 100 metre roof can produce 100 litres for every millimetre of rain.
7. Buy all your food from local producers if possible it reduces dramatically the amount of fuel used in transport – think green beans from Kenya.
8. Use environmental cleaning products, recent advances mean they are just as effective as the harsh chemical variety and are available at your local supermarket.
9. Drive less, if you do need to try to do all you can in one trip rather than many. Walk and cycle more.
10. Plant a tree as this will help offset your CO2 emissions there are many charities that will help you do this like Pure Trust and Erase My Footprint, or if you have the land plant your own, we have planted over 100 this year.
Most of these are common sense and have the added benefit of saving money.
There are of course many other ways to help like installing energy gathering equipment like windmills, photovoltaic solar panels, hot water solar panels for both household and pool use.
Grants and tax reductions are available to help with their installation and there are many people who can help you realise this sort of project we have been helped at lot by Nigel at My Solar Shop.
Related article: A green view of the gite business