Environmental awareness programme gets underway at Care UK homes

Company news

Jul 11, 2013

A new pilot scheme to make Care UK’s residential homes more environmentally friendly has been launched. The scheme has seen a number of homes in the North East and one in Slough sign up to investigate ways to reduce their environmental impact and carbon footprint.

Each of the 11 homes in the pilot will have several members of their teams acting as their eco ambassadors, with each ambassador working to find new and creative ways to reduce the environmental impact of their home.

A number of workshops were held at homes throughout the pilot region, and from these, guidelines were created for ambassadors that follow three themes:

1. Reduce – cutting wasteful use of electricity and water
2. Re-use – finding ways to re-use resources
3. Re-cycle – making full use of local authority recycling schemes and encouraging colleagues and residents to join in.

Energy saving activities will include ambassadors monitoring where heaters or fans could be turned down or used more efficiently, how electricity and gas is used in kitchens and encouraging laundry teams to dry washing outdoors.

Using water butts in gardens and raising awareness of not letting taps run unnecessarily are simple measures for reducing water consumption.

Residents will also be encouraged to get involved with measures to recycle paper and plastic, whilst ambassadors will even be investigating whether used cooking oil could be sold for re-use.

Mark Rudkins, property services director at Care UK, said: “I can see a huge opportunity and sense enormous willingness in the homes to reduce our impact on the environment.

“The key to success is everyone making little changes to their daily routines, such as switching off lights when leaving a room, using the right waste bin and not leaving taps running. Our eco ambassadors will help us by leading the change at a local level and helping us find new ways to be eco-friendly. I’ll be taking a personal interest in the feedback from those homes participating in the pilot and I look forward to launching the roll out later this year.”

The ambassadors in the two month pilot scheme will help develop targets for a full programme which will be expanded to include all Care UK homes around the UK.