The Priory Rooms Meeting and Conference Centre are delighted to receive the prestigious First Mile Gold Award for their outstanding achievements in recycling paper, plastic, card and food.

The Priory Rooms, in Birmingham city centre, are committed to sustainable and eco-friendly business policies. Their remarkable repertoire of initiatives includes recycling paper, card and plastic, providing delegates with bio-degradable doggy boxes; serving “meat-Free Monday” lunch buffets; “toilet twinning” to donate latrines across Africa; using harvested rain water to flush the toilets; and most recently decomposing their food waste! These highly-commendable eco-conscious efforts have been praised with an impressive Gold Award by their recycling contractors First Mile.

The Priory Rooms team are enthusiastic eco-warriors! Daily they work hard to recycle as much waste as possible from the busy nine meeting and conference rooms. Whether it’s the recycled paper provided for delegates and the office, or the 100% compostable and biodegradable “plastic cups” made with plant starch, to the fair-trade sugar sachets, it is all bagged to be collected by First Mile for recycling.

Throughout 2014 The Priory Rooms team have gone that extra mile, enthusiastically embracing the food waste recycling initiative! Introduced last June, all food waste is collected by First Mile who take it to an Anaerobic Digestion site in Staffordshire. The AD process coverts food waste into energy, heat and bio-fertiliser. The site even has a connection to the National Grid so the 1.3MW of green electricity produced each year from the biogas they process on site can be directly fed to the grid.

This was no easy initiative to put in place by The Priory Rooms! The idea came about when in 2013 they were delighted to receive a Silver Award from First Mile, for recycling 2000kgs, saving 23 trees and off-setting 2.9 tonnes of CO2! However, The Priory Rooms’ Manager Andrew Callan was keen to set the bar higher for 2014 aiming for a Gold Award; the main accreditation being sustainably disposing of food waste. So Andrew set about discovering a way of achieving this! First Mile representative George Garrett was enthused by Andrew’s interest and took it upon himself to make The Priory Rooms their first customer in Birmingham to have food waste collections!

Six months of impressive amounts of food waste being collected, alongside the many bags of recycling each week of the year, meant The Priory Rooms were thrilled be awarded First Mile’s highly-desired Gold Award for 2014. The final statistics were 5750kgs of recycling collected and 46 trees saved!

Andrew Callan said “I am delighted and so proud of the team. Thank you to them and our customers who help everyday with our recycling campaign. Of course this would not have been possible without the enthusiasm from First Mile enabling us to establish a food waste collection! Thank you so much!”

Lean more about The Priory Rooms environmental initiatives on the website http://www.theprioryrooms.co.uk/page/about-us/environmental-initiatives and visit the First Mile website to discover how to become a greener business http://www.thefirstmile.co.uk/about-us/

If you would like to hold your next event at the eco-conscious Priory Rooms Meeting and Conference Centre contact the highly experienced Bookings Team on 0121 236 2317 or email enquiries@theprioryrooms.co.uk