LED: Switch all your lightbulbs to LED ones. Switching your 100w incandescent light bulb can save you £9 per year for every bulb (you will also reduce your CO2 emissions by 5kg).  

• A TIMER? Assess where in your home you could fit a timing switch on your lighting (this prevents lighting being left on unnecessarily).
• MOTION SENSITIVE: It may not be suitable for every room due to safety implications, but the following product has been used by one of our members. It dims the light and therefore it’s energy consumption. https://www.lighthubdirect.com/products/balham-18w-led-emergency-microwave-sensor-maintained-non-maintained-round-corridor-bulkhead-light-3hr-ip65. 

• Can you switch to greener products? CLH, one of our gold sponsors, has a commercial eco-friendly range from ‘TRECOS’. These come in concentrate form and could give you a cost-saving on your current range. They are more than happy to have a conversation around changing to greener alternatives. 
• Another option is TOUCAN-ECO which is a clever system. It simply uses water, salt and a small electrical current to create a powerful multipurpose antibacterial disinfectant cleaner in 5mins. It can replace general disinfectant, all-purpose cleaners, kitchen and bathroom cleaners but is not a de-greaser or a deep cleaning product. There’s a minimal initial outlay, which will vary according the size of your home, but after that the cost is simply salt.  

Guardians of Grub - What a great name for a campaign to reduce food waste. Time to ‘fess up, its not ours but is used by the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance to encourage less food waste. The UK’s Hospitality and Food Service Industry throws away 1.1 million tonnes of food each year and they reckon 75% of it is avoidable. What is it in our care homes? Each care home will be different. Some use services like Apetito, individually pre-portioned and many cook from scratch. Waste can occur with either system.

Understanding where our food waste is coming from is important.

Spoilage – during delivery or in storage. Does the ordering process need adjusting to avoid wastage?

Preparation – food that is thrown away during the preparation such as off-cuts. Are there ways to use these?

Plate – food wasted after plated. Are the portion sizes over generous, are residents offered different sizes? Are garnishes wasted?

If you know how much waste is coming from which part of the process, then you can work out how best to tackle it.

Reducing food waste saves money and is better for the planet. There are lots of really useful resources on the Guardians of Grub website.

Get your staff to start thinking about being ‘greener’ in their owns lives. If staff start to have more of an understanding, then they’ll bring that into how they work as well and come up with greener care ideas that could be money-saving too.

There are numerous free tools online. The Climate hero calculator only takes 5 minutes to complete. Make it fun, start a discussion in your team, have a ‘best green’ ideas box. Have a ‘Climate Champion’ in your home.

Everyone will need to be thinking about how to be greener in our lives and have less impact on the planet.

Eagles Mount Care home is the UK’s first Carbon Neutral Care Home. DCHC has reached out to both the care home and their partner Carbon Neutral UK to learn more about this.

From our research, it looks like Carbon Neutral UK link to various projects in order to ‘offset’ your carbon emissions. To be honest, the first thing to do is to try and reduce your carbon footprint by following our tips.

However, even when we are all using renewable energy, limiting our energy usage, buying and using goods sustainably, reusing and recycling, we will still have a carbon footprint. Offsetting may still be something we need to do.