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Going Green At Hendra

Sustainable Tourism in Cornwall

Here at Hendra we are actively and continuously striving to reduce our impact on the environment and landscape. From investing in renewable energy to our ongoing rewilding projects, we hope to provide a green and nature-rich place for our local wildlife to call home.

Electric Vehicles

We have continued to switch from diesel vehicles to electric vehicles recently adding another three electric park service vehicles to our fleet, now making eight electric vehicles in total. This makes almost 50% of Hendra’s vehicles electric.

The vehicles are used for a variety of essential park operations from accommodation cleaning, grounds and site maintenance, and security. We eventually want to fully make the switch to electric vehicles.

The Environment

Looking after the environment is hugely important to us, so we’re making changes across the park to help!
We’ve transformed Blackberry field into a wildlife area, which has allowed us to launch a wildflower planting scheme across the park for wild pollinators. We wanted to create extra wild spaces for wildlife and our guests to enjoy.

Not only that but we’ve also added 200 trees to the park over the last year (2021 – 2022)

We’re also busy behind the scenes growing plants – we grow all our own plants here at Hendra, you can spot them in our various floral displays around the park. Our gardening team are super busy keeping all the gardens tip top. In 2022 we won the Amberol Trophy for Best Floral Business Display from South West in Bloom.

Sunpower Meadow

Hendra is powered by our very own 10-acre solar farm situated adjacent to the park. The solar farm generates 92% of the parks electricity demand saving 1300T of CO2 each year!

Biomass Boiler

We installed biomass boilers to heat the Oasis Fun Pools and some of our shower facilities too. We use locally sourced wood chip to power the boilers.

We also have our own bore hole supply to supply the park – all of our usage is carefully managed here on site!

Recycling

We’ve managed to reduce our general waste by 49% (2009 – 2019) with our recycling drive across the park, encouraging, reduce, reuse, recycle and free cycling points. If you have any items such as buckets and spades or bodyboards that you no longer need after your holiday, simply leave them in one of our freecycle point for another guest to use!

You might notice the gardens team busily clearing and collecting up leaves that have blown around the park – this is because we use them to as compost to help grow our lovely plants.

Wildlife

We’ve introduced four beehives – which can be seen (from a distance!) in Blackberry field. We’ve also provided two bee hives to local farms to help with cross pollination.
Families can collect a self-guided walking nature trail leaflet from reception, which helps to educate families on nature and the environment. There is also the Nature Rangers* which is guided by our very own Ranger, AJ. AJ has lots of interesting and entertaining facts. At the end of the tour get your very own certificate.

You also might be able to spot bird boxes around the park, we’ve added 50 boxes around the park to create little homes for our flying guests!

*small charge applies.

Making Changes

We’ve made some changes across the park to do what we can for the environement

  • Firstly, we’ve made a conscious effort to reduce single use plastics, from things like straws, carrier bags, sauce sachets and coffee cups to more sustainable alternatives.
  • We have a dedicated ‘Green Team’ where employees from each department put their green ideas into practice to make Hendra as sustainable as possible.
  • We’ve added thermostats to save gas and boiler power
  • General waste gets recycled into renewed energy
  • Any additional food stocks that we don’t use go to our local Newquay Food Bank
  • We’ve switched our vehicles and equipment to electric (e.g. grass strimmers. golf buggies leaf blowers)
  • Energy saving light bulbs have been added throughout the park too!

More about our SunPower Meadow

In 2011 Hendra switched over to our new 10-acres solar farm, built adjacent to the park. The 1.5 Megawatt facility is believed to be one of the first large installations to go live in the UK. Six thousand two hundred and sixty 230W solar panels have been installed adjacent to Hendra.

Jon Hyatt for Hendra said, ‘Its always been a concern for Hendra that we operate the business in sustainable way, minimising the impact on the environment as much as possible.’

A live overview of the output from SunPower Meadow can be found here.  To view the SunPower Meadow case study on the Regen SW website please click here.

More about our Biomass Boilers

Oasis Pool has undergone many steps to make sure that its reliance on fossil fuels were greatly reduced. It was critical that the visitor experience was not unreasonably compromised, so the implementation of technologies had to be carefully evaluated and continually monitored. Such measures included a new ultra-efficient pool water filtration & heating system, thermal storage, and a re-engineered air handling unit, together with a management system to integrate the running of these various elements.

Hendra built a Biomass boiler in 2014, which uses wood chip to heat the indoor pool. The fuel store holds over 30 Tonnes of wood chips and each year we will use around 300 Tonnes of sustainably sourced wood chip to displace up to 60,000 litres of oil used per year. The wood chip is obtained from local and sustainable sources, as well as using cuttings from around the Park. The boiler also produces a nutrient-filled ash residue that we use as a natural supplement to fertiliser across the park!

A Greener Oasis Fun Pool

In 2015 we were very excited to fire up our second biomass boiler to complement the original boiler and extend our non-fossil fuel heating capability via an underground heater main to both the outdoor pool and Oak shower block, saving a further 40,000 litres of oil each year!

This saves around 350 Tonnes of CO2, further reducing our carbon footprint by 20%. The emissions from the burning process are very clean and good for the environment, with the only by-product being a 1% ash residue. This ash has a rich content and we will spread this on our grounds as a supplement to fertiliser.

We were grateful to receive support through the European Regional Development Fund to help enhance the sustainability of the Oasis Fun Pools and reduce our impact on the environment.

Local School Collaborations

We work with local schools to help local children learn about the environment. We recently visited a local school to help them to set up new poly tunnels at the school to grow their own plants and vegetables! We also brought along lots of our own plants and compost to help to get them started.

Our Awards

We think it is important to keep the birds and the bees happy, not only because it is nice to see wildlife whilst on the holiday park, but also because it is important for sustainability.

Hendra’s commitment to being a sustainable business has been recognised by the following:

  • In 2022 we won the Amberol Trophy for Best Floral Business Display from South West in Bloom.
  • Gold award at South West in Bloom for the Business Leisure and Tourism Category. We won this award in 2018 too, along with  the Bruford Cup for Best Horticultural Displays in the South West.
  • Gold Award for Sustainable Tourism at the 2016/17 Cornwall Tourism Awards, building on the ‘Winner of Winners’ award at the Cornwall Sustainability Awards in 2011.

All of these were awarded to us, not only because of our beautiful grounds, but also because of our commitment to sustainability. When your visit, look out for our prize winning floral blooms, wildflower gardens and animal houses across the park encouraging insect pollination.

Animal Accommodation

We love looking after all the wildlife on park. After-all, it is their home too! We’ve installed boxes for bats so they have somewhere to roost, located on the gable end of the Playloft. We have a bug hotel (pictured), located outside the Oak toilet block which is home to a range of bugs, birds and other creatures. We’ve also installed bird houses across the park.

In 2021, we renovated our Blackberry field, where we installed beehives, and planted over 200 shrubs and trees!

Helping local schools learn about plastic pollution

Hendra has funded local schools to have Ellie Jackson’s Wild Tribe Heroes books in the classroom. These books teach children about the problem with plastics in the ocean, with tales such as Duffy’s Lucky Escape, Marli’s Tangled Tale, and Nelson’s Dangerous Dive. The books have been a huge success. The Wild Tribe Heroes books have received personal letters of congratulations from Sir David Attenborough and Prince Charles, along with lots of coverage in the national and local press.

Encouraging Guests to clean up Cornwall

We are proud of local Cornish charities such as Surfers Against Sewage and 2 Minute Beach Clean who take care of our beautiful coastline. They work hard to remove plastic waste that washes up on the beaches, which saves our local wildlife!

You can help too by making sure you recycle any rubbish while you’re out and about, or bring it back to site with you and use our recycling facilities, including our disposable BBQ bins.

We’re helping to make sure everyone only leaves footprints on the beaches!

Recycling, Plastic and Waste Reduction On Park

We encourage recycling across the site with plenty of specially designed bins. We have even installed ‘freecycle’ points to our recycling areas to encourage you to ‘freecycle’ your unwanted beach goods and holiday items rather than throw them away. Very often, guests buy these items to use on their holiday but don’t want to pack and take them home – that’s a lot of buckets, spades, windbreaks, bodyboards, camping gear and portable barbecues gone to waste!

Guests can leave their unwanted (and undamaged) re-usable items at these points. Other guests can then make use of them during their stay with us, and return them to the freecycle points again.

Lots of unrecyclable beach items are being discarded on local beaches, and this facility encourages our guests to bring their items back to their accommodation to be ‘freecycled’ rather than thrown away.

 

Recycling, Plastic and Waste Reduction On Park

Plastic waste has been reduced with reuseable Hendra coffee cups on sale, paper straws are used, along with paper and card takeaway packaging.

We have reduced the waste on Park each year and have our own compactor and waste management system. This results in a 9% reduction in general waste generated (tonnes) and a 30% reduction in general waste skip movements off site, compared with waste prior to this instillation in 2016.

In 2018 we reduced waste further with a 10% reduction in general waste generated (tonnes), a 15% reduction in general waste skip movements off site and a 23% increase in dry mixed recycling quantities sent off site (compared with 2017).

 

For more information get in touch at energy@hendra-holidays.com  

For more information on Responsible Green Camping click on the following link Green Camping

Hendra Holiday Park – Sustainable Tourism | Conservation & Environmental Projects.