Sustainability
A huge and diverse topic. Below we explain some of our actions and aspirations.
Community Impact
Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do as a holiday maker is to book accomodation that does not impact the availability and cost of local housing. A particularly high profile issue in Wales with many communities complaining that holiday property investors are pricing properties out of reach for local people, undermining communities.
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Accomodation at The Neuadd has been designated by planning as 'holiday-use only' and can never be used as permanent residences so there is no danger of being a "Cuckoo", displacing locals or pushing up house prices.
Electricity
Our first steps have been to swap in LED bulbs everywhere and to transfer our supplier to carbon zero electricity. We've invested in two guest car chargers. We felt reducing consumption was the best first step.
Waste Recycling
Wales is now one of the best recycling countries in the world and here in Powys we exceeded the Wales average by achieving 66.8% recycling (2022).
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At The Neuadd we've invested in our Joseph Joseph kitchen bins to help make the sorting process easy.
Please try to help the campaign by refering to the guidance in the cottage handbook on how best to seperate waste (frustrating how every UK county has different rules on separation!)
Heating & Insulation
In the past few years we have been through the process of replacing our three boilers with high quality, high efficiency boilers.
Our buildings are not suitable for air-source or ground-source heating (The Energy Saving Trust have been unable to offer a single example of a conversion in buildings of this type that hasn't involved gutting and major building works).
We've improved programmable control and renewed all radiator thermostats.
A big move for us has been to arrange our business plan to mostly close for the colder months (no amount of new technology can out-perform simply closing down!). Sadly Welsh Government have introduced new legislation forcing self catering properties to extend their operating seasons into winter. Some years this will undermine our intentions.
In the long term we dream of a programme of adding insulation, airtighness and the managed ventilation that would be needed to accompany this in a 'breathing' building construction of this type. Generally guests don't attribute a premium to insulation efficiency so it's not commercially viable currently, but perhaps that will change in time (we hope so).
Plastics
Wales is now on
Insects & Birds
We have been encouraging wild flowers in our meadow for several years now, and allowing some scrub to form in places. If you look close you'll find a lot of insects and an increasing diversity of flowers. This means we tend to have sheep only very ocassionally.
We tend to spot-treat thistle and docks because they can be so invasive and you are always welcome to bash down and bracken you see (bruising it repeatedly eventually exhausts the rhizome [bulb])
We may introduce some additional flowers but only from very local wild meadows as we prefer a really natural setting.
Our good friend Paul has a bee hive on our land which also helps pollination. (He might even sell you a jar of honey!).
If you stand on the escarpment and look down at the landscape you can notice how our meadow looks different because we aren't farming it or keeping it short with grazing.
We enjoy some guests feedback on the birds, flowers, insects, and moths they have identified.
Sustainable Sourcing
+Reuse and repair
Our first steps have been to swap in LED bulbs everywhere and to transfer our supplier to carbon zero electricity. We've invested in two guest car chargers. We felt reducing consumption was the best first step.