green tourism awards - environmental self-audit

The self-audit is a simple check list of areas of your activity that can potentially impact upon the environment. Through the Green Tourism Awards programme, you will receive a professional audit that looks at each of these issues in detail, but by examining them yourself beforehand, you can begin to evaluate how well you are already doing and whether there may be room for improvement.

Download the Environmental Self-Audit here. (Download file size = 53K. PDF format - Adobe Acrobat required.)

Other useful sources of information:

You may like to look at our Hints & Tips section for ideas about how to improve your performance (and possibly save a significant amount of money) in each of these areas.

In addition, you may find the following sites useful.

Tourism Support Bureau - an initiative unique to Blackpool, the support bureau has been operational since 2003 and provides a co-ordinated business support service to tourism businesses in the Blackpool ERDF and SRB wards. It can provide advice on marketing, finance, cutting costs, I.T usage in the business, environmental issues and much more.

Envirowise - free, independent, confidential advice and support on practical ways to increase profits, minimise waste and reduce environmental impact.

The Carbon Trust - free, practical advice to business and public sector organisations to help reduce energy use.

The Energy Saving Trust - tips, sources of local advice and information about grants. For smaller hotels and guesthouses, the home energy check can be a very useful tool.

Hospitable Climates - regularly updated advice and a free guide to the use of Combined Heat & Power in hotels. Also features a useful links page.

Enhanced Capital Allowances - Enhanced Capital Allowances (ECAs) enable a business to claim 100% first-year capital allowances on their spending on qualifying plant and machinery. One of the three categories covered by the scheme is energy.

National Energy Foundation - useful advice and an interesting section on common myths about energy use.

Environment Agency - helpful guidelines for saving water and energy, plus issues such as waste disposal.