Cheers! How London’s bars, restaurants and hotels are painting the town green

From the moment you step into The Conduit in Covent Garden, it’s clear that sustainability is on the menu. Quite literally in the case of the cocktail list, where one of London’s most renowned mixologists, Walter Pintus, is turning waste coffee grounds into infusions and fermenting discarded apple peels into syrups.

The members club, bar, bookshop, events space and restaurant — which first opened in October 2018 in Mayfair and moved to Covent Garden in September — describes itself as “an industry leader in sustainable and ethical hospitality”. Over six floors in this grade II listed building on Langley Street you’ll find not a scrap of single-use plastic, a Belu water system providing carbon neutral filtered water and plans for 3,000 sq ft of solar panels to be installed.

“We started The Conduit because thanks to technology, science and finance we are the first generation which can do something fundamental and radical around climate change,” says co-founder Paul van Zyl. “But — not to put too fine a point on it — we are also the last generation which can do something about it.”

Although the club has always prioritised sustainability, van Zyl says since reopening in Covent Garden they’ve “doubled down” on their initiatives to respond to growing interest from Londoners. The club had 700 membership applications in the first month of reopening, six times their projections.

“I think, post-pandemic, people feel energised and excited about coming together again in person and being part of a community that can try to reduce the effects of climate change.”

From take-away joints to Michelin-starred restaurants, big hotel brands to micro-breweries,  London’s hospitality industry is now focused on reducing its carbon footprint. Growing consumer demand, industry regulations and personal responsibility are just some of the driving forces. Given that sustainability has now become a key part of consumers’ decision-making process, the venues that ignore it increase reputational and business risk. But it also makes financial sense.

“Although putting sustainability first can feel daunting or costly, over time the costs recoup themselves,” says van Zyl. “In our restaurant we only use organic, locally-sourced products and yes they might be more expensive. But if your chefs genuinely embrace the goal of not wasting anything it’s actually much more economical in the long run. And then, because the food tastes better, bookings are up so profits are up.”

That’s something Tom Heale discovered when he, his partner and two brothers opened their Peckham restaurant Naifs in 2019.

“We started as a vegetarian restaurant using local, organic veg,” says Heale, a former sous chef at Vanilla Black. “Conventional wisdom would say ‘You can’t buy that, it’s too expensive’. But we know that the locality of our ingredients is really important to keeping our emissions down, plus sourcing locally reduces packaging and means we can have a dialogue with farmers about any surplus they’ve got that we can turn into something delicious.”

Naifs’ sustainability efforts extend back of house, too, from its eco-friendly cleaning products to its lack of table linen — “washing those can be very energy intensive and uses up a lot of water,” says Heale. Any unavoidable waste gets collected by First Mile, which uses non-recyclable business waste to generate green energy.

In January Naifs went fully vegan and introduced a set menu to eliminate more waste. Although they worried about creating a varied menu or attracting enough custom, bookings have been up since they made the switch. “We’re now open three nights a week and are usually booked out,” says Heale.

Also leading the charge in sustainable hospitality is Jikoni in Marylebone – the first independent restaurant in the UK to become carbon neutral. Chef and co-owner Ravinder Bhogal said they managed to do so “with difficulty!”

“Around 2018 I went looking for a company that would provide carbon neutral consulting for us and I got no response. It wasn’t such a pressing issue back then and no one was thinking about what independent businesses like us were doing.”

They began to work with a company called Climate Neutral which used specialist software to calculate Jikoni’s carbon footprint and then come up with ways to reduce or offset it.

“A lot of people tell us they’ve chosen to eat here because we’re a sustainable and socially-positive restaurant,” says Bhogal. “Consumers don’t want to feel like they’re part of the problem.”

London’s hotels are also making strides that go above and beyond a ‘please reuse your towels’ sign in the bathroom.

“A lot of London hotels have responded to consumer demand and are stepping up to become more sustainable and to communicate what they’re doing,” says Juliet Kinsman, founder of Bouteco, a curation of boutique hotels making positive changes. “For me it’s about the less sexy stuff. ‘No plastic straws’ is a bit of a limp boast these days. It’s harder to decarbonise your supply chain or monitor your energy use and bring it down.”

Kinsman points out that “eco hotel” doesn’t have to mean hemp bedding and woodchip toilets.

“The Zetter in Clerkenwell has its own borehole beneath the building from which it draws its own water to flush the toilets and cool the fridges,” she says. “Hotels can contribute to socio-economic sustainability, too. Take The Goring Hotel, which is about as opulent and luxurious as you can get. And yet it also runs The Hotel School which teaches hospitality skills to homeless and vulnerable young people.”

Meanwhile, Edition hotels are on a mission to be entirely plastic-free, The Rosewood has a rooftop garden designed with London Bee Line to create a 75km pollinating pathway and at Treehouse Hotel on Oxford Circus there’s an anaerobic digester which turns food waste into liquid.

Over on Southwick Street, everything about the Inhabit Hotel has a nod to sustainability, from the Ege regenerable carpets (in other words they can be turned into new nylon products) to the Who Gives A Crap? recycled toilet paper.

“Sustainability has always been a passion of mine,” says Nadira Lalji, co-founder of Inhabit Hotels. “When we were thinking about creating a hotel focused on wellbeing it wasn’t just in ourselves, it was about feeling good about the wider world.”

“It’s one thing to operate a hotel more sustainably, it’s another to construct one from scratch, but we as hoteliers need to think about this,” she adds. In the construction of Inhabit Hotel’s forthcoming property in Queens Gardens, 59% of waste was recycled, 41%  of energy was recovered and 0% of waste was landfilled.

Lalji says that, post-Covid, guests have been more receptive to the hotel’s sustainability initiatives. “People are actively seeking us out,” she says. “We’re a small property so there’s a limit to what we can do, but we can create a ripple effect. It is in this way that hotels can have the greatest impact; not simply during a guest’s stay, but in helping to encourage positive change in daily life.”

“This is the first thing any hotel, restaurant or bar should do,” says Juliet Kinsman, founder of Bouteco. “Then you can look at where you can make savings and how you can improve insulation. So many London hotels, particularly in older buildings, don’t have double-glazed windows, for example.” One of Jikoni’s first steps to going carbon neutral was to switch to Ecotricity, an energy provider which generates its electricity from solar and wind.

2. Turn cooking oil into fuel

Kitchen waste isn’t just about food. Fats, oils and grease are a big waste product from every hospitality kitchen in the capital and cause an estimated 70% of blockages in the UK – think of those giant fatbergs. But it is possible to recover and recycle waste oil and turn it into something useful. Companies such as Olleco recycle used kitchen oil and turn it into biodiesel, a clean-burning, green alternative to petroleum diesel fuel which reduces vehicle carbon emissions by 88%.

Hiring local staff, sourcing local ingredients and working with local suppliers will all bring your carbon footprint down. It also means you can showcase the best of what your region has to offer. “Our guests love hearing about the little green-belt farm their potatoes came from and we’ll often mention it on the menu,” says Tom Heale, who sources a lot of ingredients for his restaurant Naifs via Shrub, a wholesale grocer supplying London and Sussex restaurants with sustainable, locally-grown produce.

Well-informed staff are key when it comes to communicating your sustainability measures effectively. Not only does this help customers make more informed choices but it also has a ripple effect beyond the business. “Creating a culture of zero waste in our business has led to real behaviour change at home for our staff and members,” says The Conduit’s Paul van Zyl.

Paper menus and flyers contribute to a massive amount of waste in the hospitality industry. QR codes in restaurants and bars and platforms such as SuitePad in hotels can cut down on printing costs, paper waste and provide a channel for offering other services to customers, such as the option to opt-out of daily room cleaning.