Sustainability, reducing waste and trying to do our bit to protect the environment is very important to us here at Driftwood Stays.
Last year, we noticed that a fair amount of unused food was getting thrown away at the end of guest stays.
Whilst we would take some of it home for ourselves or give it to the cleaning team to take home for their families, we couldn’t use it all and we felt sure there must be a way to ensure it didn’t go to waste.
We also like to support local as much as we can, so after a bit of investigative work in the village, we came across the amazing Amanda Phillips, who set up Sparkles Food Parcels. She started this project during lockdown, making up and delivering food parcels to struggling families in the local area.
She is a single mum of 4 and knows only too well how difficult it can be to put food on the table. She has grown her project to now help around 50 families in the villages surrounding our holiday cottages.
We have put clearly labelled crates into both Driftwood Haven and Driftwood Corner so that guests can leave any food items they don’t want to take home, but know they will not get wasted! We then deliver the food to Amanda, who in turn distributes it to her families. We have already had some food left to give her, which is fantastic! We are sure, come the summer, when we have large self-catering family groups staying in our holiday homes, we will be able to help her project even more.
Whilst on the subject of sustainability and reducing waste – last year we introduced refillable bottles for toiletries and washing up liquid which worked well. This year we have started working with a new brand called Bright Earth.
The fresh citrus scent is gorgeous and we prefer that they use recycled plastic bottles, compared to the glass ones we had from our previous supplier. Far safer for our guests to use in the shower in case they get dropped!
You may well come into our holiday cottages and notice the bottles aren’t entirely full or a half-used, recycled toilet roll is on the holder. This is deliberate. We are trying to limit waste everywhere we can which we hope you will support and understand.
In May we will be looking at offsetting our carbon footprint again – we have some different avenues to explore this year – hopefully more local – so watch this space …
If you would like to find out more about our family friendly self catering holiday cottages check out Driftwood Stays.