For your lifetime: working to meet one of our sustainability goals of reducing our waste
Last year, The Safari Series pledged to ‘Declare A Climate Emergency’. This meant we signed up with 500 other members of the tourism industry to declare that we believe that the threat of climate chance is upon us and only if we act now can we prevent lifelong and catastrophic damage to our eco-systems. You can read our pledge here.
One of the items in the pledge is to reduce our waste. When running any type of accommodation, waste will be produced. Especially from inside the kitchen, the waste was piling high - both left over food and packaging from ingredients. It was here that we started our mission.
To reduce having to buy packaging in the first place, we have switched to a local organic-only farmer. All here vegetables are delicious, local and have the extra big bonus of not being sprayed with chemicals. Her yummy fruits and veg are delivered on a motorbike to us, and then we give all the buckets, boxes and bags back to her for re-use. Instantly, our packaging for vegetables and fruit has gone down by 100%.
We have always been buying drinks that are produced locally, such as beers and sodas, in glass bottle form. This means that we can return the glass bottles black to the shop and they can be reused again and again. However, drinks such as a wine, beers in tin cans and other drinks cannot be returned to the producer. However, our attention was brought to a recycling plant in Nanyuki town that is recycling a huge number of items such as cardboard, glass, plastic, metal and more. Now, every week we are able to take these items to be recycled instead of just thrown away. A big win!
As mentioned above, it wasn’t just material waste that was filling up, but also vegetable and food waste. It is always hard to judge exactly what and how much guests will eat at a certain meal and there will always be leftovers (better than guests walking away from the table hungry!), but this means that food was being wasted. To combat this, we brought in chef advisor Alice Coulson to help Stella work out how to use leftovers better and to make sure food that could be reused wasn’t being thrown away. We also have been much more focused on keeping vegetable waste like peelings and have recently built a compost pit. While we buy 90% of all veggies and fruit from the organic farmer, we also like to add a few special treats that she does not grow - such as berries. Because of this wish, we have planted a fruit garden (outside of Lolldaiga Hills) where the compost will be used to grow fruit for guest’s to enjoy at breakfast. Yum!
