Beach Garbage Hotel
January 27, 2012 at 4:44 pm
How do you make a statement on the state of the world’s oceans? Make a hotel out of rubbish of course. Made from 12 tonnes of beach debris, in the centre of Madrid, the Garbage Beach Hotel, was temporarily opened in January 2011. The aim was to send a message to the tourism industry about the future of holiday hot-spots, not just in Spain, but in the rest of Europe too, if the waters and coastlines were not cleaned up soon.
The five bedroom hotel was littered with decoration ranging from toys, to plastic drums and tyres, and all the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the polluted shores of many of Europe’s beaches.
This is not the first eco-hotel either. Sweden’s renowned Ice Hotel has to be the ultimate recycling project. Rebuilt every year, the ice and snow melts back into the river. Of course there is an environmental impact of building and running the hotel, so efforts to produce more renewable energy than is consumed are being made. The architects of the Ice Hotel have made a pledge to be CO2 negative by 2015.
In the UK, even hotel chain Premier Inn has opened its first eco-lodge, in January 2012, designed to use less energy. Features at the 65 bedroom Cornish hotel include ground source heat pumps for adjusting room temperature and water temperature.
Sustainably-sourced timber, LED lighting and key cards which ensure energy is not used up in unoccupied rooms, add to the green-consciousness of this business, with plans to incorporate many of these energy-saving architectural and design features in future builds.
Leave a Reply