AN ECO-FRIENDLY youth hostel in Stratford has installed a water fountain to cut down on the use of plastic bottles.
The YHA in Alveston is saving some 20,000 plastic bottles a year, once included in its ‘picnic lunch packs’, and encouraging guests to bring their own bottle to fill up instead.
The charity organisation, which operates hostels throughout the UK, has teamed up with the Refill scheme, which encourages businesses to provide free water refills to passersby and customers.
Manager Stephen Dodgson said: “As a business that accommodates over 30,000 guests a year, we need to get the message out there that if we continue living in our current manner we will have destroyed the only planet that we have got to live on.
“The profusion of single use plastic bottles is unsustainable and we should all be playing our part in reducing our impact on this world and the wildlife therein. It is the young people who will be the custodians of this planet in the future and we adults have a duty of care to educate them in more responsible ways of interacting with the world and reducing the devastating effect our current lifestyles are having on this earth.”
He added the hostel regularly saw a big queue waiting to fill their bottles for the day ahead.
Other ways in which the hostel is reducing its landfill waste includes the sale of reusable cups and discounts on hot drinks, and the use of bio-degradable bin bags.
