Location
Europe
Company size
39004
Industry
Target
Whitbread PLC commits to becoming Net Zero by 2040 from a 2016 baseline year.
Whitbread PLC is a British multinational hotel, coffee shop and restaurant company. Its prominent subsidiaries include Premier Inn and Costa Coffee, which was sold to The Coca-Cola Company in 2019. The company employs approximately 35,000 people. Whitbread's operations are primarily based in the UK, but it also has a significant presence in Germany and the Middle East.
We have also successfully trialled the installation of air source heat pumps in 40 of our hotels.
We recognise that customer travel adds to our Scope 3 emissions; as such, we have so far added 140 EV charging points across nearly 60 sites, with over 40 additional sites planned in the next few months. We will continue this roll-out across our estate to encourage and support EV uptake and use.
Our priority is to operate highly efficient hotels and restaurants which use targeted efficiency measures and behaviour change programmes to drive down carbon emissions. We have been working on this for a while already and now have a well-established and embedded energy management and reduction strategy, which includes efficiency measures such as voltage optimisation, switching to LED lighting and using an additive to make our boilers operate more efficiently
We source 98% of our electricity in the UK from renewable energy. We will continue to increase our capacity to use renewable energy in our hotels and restaurants, and decarbonise our estate through phasing out gas equipment for heating, cooking and hot water in operations and switching to more efficient renewable-powered alternatives. include solar photovoltaic (PV) for renewable energy generation across 20% of our estate.
Decarbonising our existing estate remains a significant challenge, and we are facing this head-on by investing in ‘retrofit to net zero’ trials at one of our gas powered sites.
