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Tech and Ingenuity Supercharge a Sustainable Hotel

Posted on by dishanth
Tech and Ingenuity Supercharge a Sustainable Hotel

Automation, emissions analysis, upgraded technology, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence – these are just a handful of ways that businesses are promoting sustainability and reducing greenhouse gasses.

Hotel Marcel, based in New Haven. Conn., wants to lead the way when it comes to sustainability in the hospitality sector. With this goal in mind, a team of eco-conscious design, architecture, and technology experts have built the first net-zero hotel in the United States. Hotel Marcel is also one of only 10 LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum-certified hotels in the country. Since its opening in 2022, the hotel has won countless awards related to its sustainability.

Hotel Marcel had a long life before becoming what it is today. It started life as the Armstrong Rubber Company Building in 1968. After a period of vacancy started in the late 1990s, the building was listed on the Connecticut Register of Historical Places in 2020 and then the National Register of Historical Places in 2021. Those designations added challenges for converting the building into an eco-friendly hotel. But with a steadfast vision by lead architect, developer, and owner Bruce Becker, along with partner Sinclair Digital, the hotel is now a model for those that follow.

 

Renovated Hotel Relies on Renewable Energy and Microgrid Technology

The details are impressive. The hotel reused as much of the existing infrastructure as possible during a full renovation. To meet its goal of generating all its power, the hotel relies on renewable solar power onsite to produce electricity for the entire property. Engineers also installed triple-glazed windows for efficient insulation; a heat pump system for hot water, space heating, and cooling; and elevators that generate their own electricity. Even the hotel’s laundry room runs on renewable electricity instead of natural gas.

While some of these measures, like coated windows and renewable building materials, were right in Becker’s wheelhouse, other, more technology-driven features were less so. Early in the process, Becker’s team installed an energy-efficient, DC-powered microgrid for the hotel’s converters, microcontrollers, and batteries. The localized, solar-powered DC microgrid runs independently of the main power grid and is powered by an Ageto ARC controller, which enables grid services and resilience sequencing.

Becker knew from learning about other sustainable hotel endeavors like the Sinclair Hotel of Fort Worth, Texas, that low-voltage Power over Ethernet (Poe) would make a significant difference. Unlike high voltage power, low voltage uses less electrical current and sends power and controls on the same cable, reducing the amount of infrastructure required and resulting in greater energy efficiency. These systems also operate at levels of as low as 24 volts, making them safer and installable without an electrician.

“Our engineers visited the Sinclair Hotel to see how PoE would work in a hotel setting,” Becker said. “We were very keen on using it for lighting and intelligent occupancy sensors and integrating it with mechanical blackout and sheer shades to create quiet, dark, and efficient rooms.”

 

Installing Lantronix Switches

At the same time, the Sinclair organization, now called Sinclair Digital, was expanding from its role as a traditional hotel developer to a consultant that partners with hotel developers to choose and implement PoE and other energy-saving technologies.

To enable PoE throughout Hotel Marcel, Sinclair Digital advised implementing Lantronix’s Smart Managed Gigabit PoE++ switch, which would support direct, high-voltage DC power and the latest PoE standard.

“After we did the Hotel Sinclair, we learned about Lantronix,” explained Sinclair Digital COO Hannah Walker. “We knew that it was increasing the power of its technology to 90 watts as opposed to 60 watts, which meant that if you had a network switch with 24 ports, you can now pass 90 watts per port, which gives you a lot of capacity.”

In keeping with the low-voltage theme, Sinclair also installed VoltServer Digital Electricity to power the Lantronix switches. This enables the switches to safely transport DC power at high wattages over long distances on Class 2 wiring. Digital Electricity is a low-voltage technology but has the power and distance capabilities of AC by splitting energy into packets and transmitting them every second by the hundreds from a transmitter to a receiver unit.

Racks of switches now populate four original electrical closets throughout the property, connected via fiber run between the floors. The switches power lighting and motorized window treatments and are integrated with the HVAC system. Becker said that the hotel’s 55 PoE++ switches have reduced lighting energy use by more than 30%.

 

Emergency Battery Backup System

Next up was comprehensive emergency battery backup for the entire hotel, including emergency lighting, elevators, and stairway pressurization. While emergency battery backup was a fairly new concept, Walker recommended going the extra mile because of its significant energy savings.

“All of the systems we use today in buildings are DC inside, so all renewable energy generates in DC,” Walker explained. “But every time you transport it in AC, you lose 15% of efficiency, and it adds up.”

The team chose a battery developed by Sinclair and LG Electronics. The massive Lithium Ion battery, designed to replace energy-hogging diesel generators, can be recharged with solar panels via a microgrid.

 

Grand Opening

With everything in place, the hotel opened last spring. Five-star ratings populate virtually every hotel booking and review site.

Becker ensured all systems were metered to help the hotel stay on track with its sustainability goals and LEED Platinum requirements. Both the Lantronix and VoltServer equipment have in-line metering capabilities and associated software. Becker and Walker will consider adding an energy monitoring system to better determine energy usage at all points and so guests can see how much energy their rooms save.

With its focus on sustainability practices, it’s unsurprising that Hotel Marcel continues to break barriers. Today, it’s on the cusp of being certified as the only Passive House hotel in the United States. Passive House, which focuses on building energy and efficiency, is a well-established standard in Europe and is gaining popularity in the U.S.

 

 

 

 

Source  ItProToday

Meet the giant mechanical stomach turning food waste into electricity

Posted on by dishanth
Meet the giant mechanical stomach turning food waste into electricity

Tonnes of food scraps collected from restaurants and supermarkets are being converted into electricity under a green energy initiative powering thousands of homes in Perth.

The City of Cockburn has made the waste to energy service a permanent fixture of its general duties, collecting rotting food waste from local businesses and feeding it to a mechanical ‘stomach’ at a nearby fertiliser plant.

The anaerobic digester heats the food, traps its methane gas and feeds the energy into the electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.

 

Key points:

  • A giant mechanical stomach is turning tonnes of food waste to energy
  • The electricity is being fed into the grid, powering 3,000 homes
  • The City of Cockburn has made the initiative part of its general duties

 

“Food waste really shouldn’t be thought of as a waste, it should be thought of as a resource,” said the city’s waste education officer, Clare Courtauld.

 

“It’s really important to take food waste out of landfill because it produces harmful greenhouse gases.

“If global food waste was a country, it would actually be the third-highest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.”

 

Food scraps are fed to the mechanical stomach around the clock.(Flickr: Taz, CC BY 2.0)

 

Ms Courtauld said the City had so far recycled 43 tonnes of food waste and saved 81,000 kilograms of CO2 equivalent gasses that would have otherwise entered the atmosphere rotting in landfill.

The $8 million mechanical stomach sits at the Jandakot headquarters of fertiliser company RichGro.

It was the first bio-waste plant of its kind to operate in the southern hemisphere when it opened in 2016.

 

“Their trucks come in … they tip off the food waste.

“It then goes through a piece of machinery which removes any packaging that might be in with the food waste and any contamination.

“It pulps the food waste up into like a porridge consistency and doses it into a big tank.

 

The food waste is pulped into a rich slurry and pumped into the digester.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)

 

“This tank then feeds the two digesters … they’re getting fed 24 hours a day.

“As it breaks down, it generates methane gas. We’re capturing that gas and we’re running large generators that combined can produce up to 2.4 megawatts of electricity.”

The plant powers the company’s entire operations and up to 3,000 neighbouring homes, all from food waste.

 

What goes in, must come out

“Out the back end comes a liquid that is actually certified organic as a liquid fertilizer,” Mr Richards said.

“We sell a percentage of that to farmers and the remaining percentage of it we add into our compost piles.”

 

The bioenergy plant converts the methane gas from food waste into electricity to feed into the local power grid.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)

 

Some foods are better than others.

 

“Certainly, you can overdo a good thing — you wouldn’t want too much fats, oils and greases.

“A lot of fruit and vege, starchy, sugary products are good. They produce a lot of energy.”

The City’s waste manager, Lyall Davieson, said there was community appetite for these sorts of initiatives.

“I’ve been in waste for about 25 years,” he said.

“Not so long ago, all we could really do was just recycle a few cans and a bit of steel.

“But now we really have at our disposal lots of options to divert waste from landfill and to recycle.”

 

The energy created from food waste is fed into the existing electricity grid, powering up to 3,000 homes.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)

 

Frank Scarvaci, who owns a longstanding independent supermarket in Hamilton Hill, was one of the first businesses to sign up for the service.

He said it was a natural progression for his grocery store after embracing a plastic bag ban and installing solar power.

“I’ve been surprised [at] how the community has accepted the change,” he said.

“I thought [there] was going to be much more resistance in regards to when they scrapped plastic bags, for example — but there was virtually no resistance at all.”

 

Contamination causes indigestion

While common in Europe, the plant is just one of a few of its kind to be built in Australia.

 

People living close to the plant in Perth’s southern suburbs wouldn’t even know their homes are being powered by food waste.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)

 

The City of Cockburn said it was not a waste service it would expand to households, because the risk of contamination disrupting the process was too high.

“We do have a machine that does have a certain ability to remove a level of the contamination,” Mr Richards said.

“Can it remove everything? No, it can’t.

“We’ve even had bowling balls come through — you can’t process things like that, in a system like this. It does damage our machinery.”

 

Bio-energy has a bright future

The bio-energy technology is growing in Australia, with the next logical step in the process to convert the bio-waste into biomethane, which could be fed into the gas grid.

The Federal Government is co-funding a biomethane production facility at a wastewater treatment plant in Sydney’s southern suburbs.

Once online in 2022, the $14 million plant is expected to pump biomethane derived from biogas created by a similar ‘mechanical stomach’ that would meet the gas needs of more than 13,000 homes.

 

 

By Gian De Poloni

Source ABC News Australia

InterContinental Hotels Group turning plastic bottles into plush hotel bedding

Posted on by dishanth
InterContinental Hotels Group turning plastic bottles into plush hotel bedding

Hospitality businesses have a special opportunity when it comes to driving positive change. Whether you’re a restaurant owner or run thousands of hotels like InterContinental Hotel Group, hospitality companies work in a connected, people industry and exist at the heart of communities — employing local people and operating with a network of partners and suppliers.

IHG is uniquely positioned to be able to make a difference because of its scale and, importantly, this is all underpinned by the company’s culture of doing business responsibly, which guides our decisions and how we work.

IHG has almost 6,000 hotels around the world and the vast majority — around 80 percent — are franchised, which presents a unique challenge when it comes to implementing change at scale. It means the IHG team is in constant dialogue with our hotel owners, who operate and finance these hotels, so that we can work with them to drive sustainable change. We also know that our guests and colleagues are hugely passionate about how we behave towards the planet and our communities, so this makes engagement, collaboration and partnership key to getting things done.

For example, when it comes to minimizing IHG’s waste footprint, our teams consider each stage of the hotel lifecycle to find solutions that can be amplified and rolled out at scale. We do this in a way that supports the hotel’s operational needs, while enhancing the guest experience wherever we can.

Today’s technology plays an important role in making such changes because it enables IHG to identify suppliers and partners that have developed innovative solutions to find new ways to embed sustainability into their products, and in turn create solutions that help us reduce our environmental footprint, drive a more circular approach and produce an even better experience for our guests.

 

IHG has around 400,000 colleagues around the world. Source: IHG.

 

One great supplier relationship that illustrates this at IHG is with The Fine Bedding Company, which is working with us to help minimize the global plastic waste footprint through our growing voco hotels brand.

The supplier takes single-use plastic bottles that have been discarded and repurposes them in its eco factory to become plush, cozy filling inside the duvets and pillows of our voco guest rooms all over the world. In fact, more than 3 million water bottles have been diverted from landfill and into our bedding to date. When you think of the scale this innovation ultimately can create over time, it’s a huge amount of waste that’s being repurposed and also helping to drive more circular operations for our hotels.

 

Filling is extruded and spun from recycled plastic bottles. Source: The Fine Bedding Co.

 

Since forming this partnership, we have received great feedback from our guests, who say that this initiative not only provides them with a great sleep experience, but knowing it is good for the planet brings extra value to their stay.

For us, it’s exciting that consumers are becoming more aware of sustainable innovations such as these, and we are seeing uptake grow across our hotels, with our owners showing increasing interest. It’s a great opportunity for the suppliers themselves, too. Claire Watkin, managing director at The Fine Bedding Company, says working with IHG has many benefits for her business.

“At The Fine Bedding Company, our aspiration is to find ways to recycle products at the end of their life so that they can be truly circular, and so this bedding was really exciting for us,” Watkin said. “We worked in partnership with IHG to create something that had never been done before in the hospitality sector, and it achieved many firsts: It was fully traceable with Global Recycling Standard, it used more sustainable cotton and it was produced in our zero-waste factory that uses 100 percent renewable energy. A few years on, it’s great to see the positive feedback from the guests at voco hotels on both the quality and innovative nature of the product. For us, it has set a new standard in sustainability of bedding, which we look forward to seeing roll out across other brands as it becomes more mainstream.”

 

The Fine Bedding Company’s Nimbus Smartdown collection. Source: The Fine Bedding Co.

 

As we begin to recover from the impact of COVID-19, the focus must remain on the long-term sustainability agenda, ensuring we adapt to a new normal in a way that continues to drive circular economy practices and protects environments and communities.

This makes partnerships such as the one we have with The Fine Bedding Company more important than ever. If we want to emerge from the events of this year in a stronger position that helps protect the planet, it’s important we share ideas and collaborate to find solutions. You can’t isolate a business from its value chain, so working together towards common goals becomes even more central to moving forward.

 

 

By Sopan Shah

Source Green Biz

Bengaluru Startup is Making 10,000 Straws a Day, All From Fallen Coconut Leaves

Posted on by dishanth
Bengaluru Startup is Making 10,000 Straws a Day, All From Fallen Coconut Leaves

To reduce the negative impact on the environment, many businesses and individuals have switched to sustainable products. One such important switch has been using alternatives to plastic straws. Many restaurants across the country are now serving beverages with straws made from materials like paper, bamboo, wheat stubble, and metal.

Evlogia Eco Care, a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2018, is one such organization making eco-friendly straws named ‘Kokos Leafy Straws’, made using dried coconut leaves.

“While the midrib that holds the coconut leaves are used to make brooms, the leaves are discarded as agricultural waste at the farms. The straws are made using those discarded leaves after they undergo an intense cleaning process,” says Manigandan Kumarappan, the founder of the startup.

 

How is the straw made?

The dried coconut leaves are procured from four farms located in Tamil Nadu – Palani, Dindigul, Madurai, and Ottanchathiram.

Here, women are employed in farms run by NGO-supported Self Help Groups. Each farm has a varying number of women who collect these leaves, wash them under running water, and dry them under the sun for a few days.

“The leaves are then sent across to the production unit in Bengaluru which is also the head office. Here, it undergoes a pressure-heating process which is a deep clean method. Using a machine developed in-house, the leaves are washed in 120 degrees celsius steam which helps to make them soft and roll them easily into straws.”

At the production unit, Manigandan has currently employed 15 women from the local neighborhood in Kanakapura who roll the leaves into straws.

 

Women making the straws at the Bangalore production unit.

 

“With the help of three in-house employees, we made a rolling machine which is like a sewing machine that helps to roll the leaves into straws. The device is powered manually by applying pressure from the feet. This helps to roll the leaves by maintaining the desired diameter of 3 millimeters,” he says.

Finally, using a cutting machine the straws are cut into a standard size of 8.25 inches. But, Manigandan says, if a customer places a bulk order, the size can be adjusted according to their requirement. The straw can be made in a size ranging from 4 inches to 12 inches. Based on the size the price varies from Rs.1.5 to Rs 3.

From preparing the raw material to packaging the final product, the work is entirely done by women. Manigandan claims the product can be kept in hot beverages for half an hour and cold beverages for up to 6 hours.

 

The inspiration behind the product

The founder, Manigandan has previously worked with several Multinational Companies. In 2016, he decided to leave the corporate life and become an entrepreneur. On that note, he started Tenco – a company that sells half-trimmed coconuts over e-commerce platforms.

“The product was delivered to the customer along with a plastic straw. But, some customers gave us feedback about the same and requested that we switch to a sustainable alternative. This made us think about what we could do, and soon we stumbled upon the idea of using coconut leaves which are the least used product from the tree,” says Mani adding that the leaves are sturdy, and can even pierce through tetra packs without bending.

Nakul Mysore Jayaram, the owner of World of Coffee Cafe in Chikmagalur has been using the product since September 2019. He says this straw is more versatile compared to paper straws which he used earlier to serve beverages.

“The coconut leaf straw is sturdy and does not get soggy like paper straws. Earlier customers used to complain about the paper straws and would request to replace it repeatedly or ask for a plastic one. But with the coconut leaf one we have had no complaints from the customers,” says Nakul.

 

About the startup

The company was founded in 2018 along with his wife Radha Manigandan. The duo raised seed investments supported by Hindustan Petroleum. In January 2019, the production of straws began with one employee which has now grown to 15 employees.

Earlier, the company was making 100 straws/ day, now, their capacity has increased to 10,000 in a day.

 

The founder Manigandan, co-founder Radha Manigandan, and the three engineers.

 

Manigandan says, “We had only a rolling machine to maintain the size of straws, but could not increase production capacity as the pressure-heating sterilization had to be done using a cooking grade pressure cooker. This could hold only a few leaves at a time, and the process took 50-60 minutes. Three months ago, we introduced the pressure-heating machine which was made in-house with the help of three engineers who are interns turned full-time employees. Though this machine takes the same time to sterilize the leaves, it can hold a larger capacity and help to produce 10,000 straws in one day.”

Currently, the straws are being distributed across Canada, UAE, Germany, USA, and a handful of restaurants in Bangalore. Apart from straws, the startup has also ventured into making air-tight food containers from Areca leaves.

If you wish to place an order for the straws, you can contact the startup through their website.

 

 

By 

Source: The Better India