Reducing our Carbon Foot Print

Here at the Riverside Park Hotel, we pride ourselves in our planet responsibilities and we attempt in every way commercially possible and without impacting on our customer comforts to protect our environment by minimising our carbon footprint at every opportunity.

These are some of the ways in which we have taken climate action protection measures:

Switch from oil-fired burners to air to water heat pump systems.

Water heat pumps are highly efficient, ecologically friendly.

Smart temperature-controlled fan assisted throughout the hotel.

 Controlled heating for swimming pool, jacuzzi, air heating and underground heating. 

This system on an annual basis equates to a saving of 2270 tonnes of Carbon annually.

The hotel system was a finalist in the National Heat Pump awards for 2012 and was the overall outright winner in 2013.

Centralisation of our cooling systems.

Through utilising Glycol in our cooling system, the Riverside Park Hotel have been able to centralise their cooling source and run all of the beer cooling and all of our walk-in fridges from one chiller system and have eliminated the use of older damaging refrigerant gases for a more modern, much more efficient, safer and eco-friendly system. This system is delivering annual electrical savings of €5,500 per annum 

Utilisation of heated gases (by-product) for pre-heating all hot water.

The gas coolant system which uses the incoming cold water to cool down the refrigerant gas from our centralised system means we effectively get ‘free hot water’ from our Beer Cooling system. This gas would normally be cooled down by using electricity to run fans to cool the gas through a traditional radiator type system but instead we run the gas through a ‘highly efficient hot water cylinder’ and the cold incoming water cools down the gas before going on to our hot water system This delivers over a half million litres of hot water to the hotel customers every year. This system has delivered gas usage savings of €1,800 per annum. 

Towel laundering as required.

In order to minimise the amount of chemicals and energy used in needles laundry of clean towels, our housekeeping staff only remove, and launder towels as required by our bedroom guests, the Riverside encourage guests to only launder used towels

The elimination of hundreds of thousands of single use plastic soap bottles having been replaced by a superior pump dispensed product through the use of ‘Voya’ products throughout 

We have chosen to eliminate the thousands of plastic soap/shampoo/bodywash containers dumped every year by the hotel by applying an in-room pump system whereby we re-fill the pump bottles in the room on a daily basis with a sustainable and non-damaging soap extracted from seaweed made here in Ireland in Sligo by the Voya company. By eliminating the cost of smaller individual bottles, the Riverside Park Hotel was able to invest in far superior and well recognised cleansing product. 

Adoption of rigid re-cycling policy throughout the hotel.

The Riverside Park hotel has introduced a re- cycling programme by purchasing a large quantity of food composting and recycling bins which are located throughout the hotel. These bins are used to help our back of house teams recycle as many items as possible in order to drastically reduce what we send to landfill. 

Energy Efficient LED Lighting programme. 

The Riverside Park Hotel has reduced its energy bills from lighting by 70% by replacing all lights to LED Lighting.  

Food Disposal Unit

The Riverside Park Hotel has a food waste processing system in operation that is used to reduce waste costs by 80% and reduce the amount of waste that we send to land fill. 

The system works by mulching all food into waste and then the waste is pumped from the Intake to a Holding Tank. 

At the end of the process the waste is delivered automatically from the Holding Tank to an RDI Dehydrator which is located adjacent to the tank. The Dehydrator removes the water from the waste with the remaining solid matter collected in a bin. The result is a reduction in waste volume by up to 80%.