Green Staff Dig In At Nature Reserve

Accor Services employees donned their wellies and helped out at a community nature reserve to show their support for the company’s second annual Earth Guest Day on 22nd April.

The Earth Guest Day is a major international initiative in which Accor mobilises its 150,000 staff in 100 countries to take part in local development, health and environmental projects.

In the UK, staff rolled up their sleeves and dug in on their own doorstep by improving a community nature reserve at Bethnal Green, North London.  Workers left their desks for the day to head for the nature reserve, where in addition to tidying overgrown weeds and trees, they made and installed bird boxes, planted hundreds of wildflowers and hung animal signs made by local schoolchildren.

Their hard work will boost the nature reserve’s many residents – ranging from rare beetles and birds, to foxes, frogs and butterflies, and many edible or medicinal plants.

Twenty employees from Chester based Capital Incentives and Motivation (part of the Accor Services) also swapped office life for the great outdoors and provided practical help for the Cheshire Wildlife Trust.

During a team-building day at the Trust’s headquarters, they worked together to build and repair timber fences to keep livestock in place over the summer months.  The company also made a financial contribution to the Trust – and is planning more team-building days in the future.

Worldwide, parent company Accor, enrolled its 4,000 hotels in the ‘Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign’ run by the United Nations Environment Programme. 

To support the campaign, Accor has pledged to donate 50 per cent of the savings it made on its hotel laundry costs which were achieved by encouraging guests to keep their bath towels for more than one night. Following a successful pilot, the initiative is now being rolled out to all of Accor’s 4000 hotels across the globe.

“The project should enable us to finance the planting of three million trees by 2012,” said Gilles Pelisson, Accor Chief Executive Officer.  “I am very proud that the Group actively supports the UNEP in this reforestation project, which involves operators and customers of all our hotel brands, from economy to luxury.”

Accor also supports sustainable development in its hotels by using fair trade products in more than 1,000 sites while encouraging staff to save water, recycle and reduce energy use per room by 10 per cent across the group.

In the UK, this is just the latest initiative led by employees of Accor Services as part of its on-going commitment to the environment. Previous actions have seen employees helping clean up parts of the River Thames and planting trees with children at a local school.