Tag: Sustainability

Sustainability

The eco score: how does the build stack up?

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 29 September 2023

A carbon-neutral space

How does The Vacationist Eco Cabin stack up?

Keeping the planet in mind

Can we say we are carbon neutral? It’s tricky to find a calculator or website that can confirm that for us, but what we do know is that to measure it, we need to think about two things:

Embodied carbon – connected with the build
Operational carbon – connected with the use.

Solar power

Solar panels need to be installed for just three years before the overall carbon footprint drops into the negatives. At this point, the panels will be preventing more emissions than it took to create them.

We’ve hooked up the solar to our infrared heating and water heater so that if you have excess energy it can be diverted to where you need it most. Nothing is wasted.

That means both the embodied and operational carbon are on target to be zero.

Solid foundations

Concrete is responsible for 4-8% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – second only to water, it is the most widely used substance on Earth after water.

We chose to repurpose an old trailer for our base which means we don’t need foundations. We also gave new life to a piece of old machinery that serves no functional purpose anymore. We look at that as a win for both operational and embodied carbon.

Working with wood

Wood is renewable, has a lower thermal conductivity than brick and also stores more carbon than the manufacturing process uses, making it a carbon neutral material.

By sourcing wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), who typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled, we ensure growth in both forest cover and
CO2-hungry young trees.

We chose to use repurposed wood to clad our entire cabin. Saving carbon and saving trees.

Heating with gas

Heating was an environmental compromise for us. We cannot make it completely carbon-neutral because we have to use fuel to heat the cabin and the water supply for showers. This is a luxury cabin after all!

We chose to use propane. Whilst this is sourced from crude oil, so is not as environmentally friendly as solar, wind, geothermal or hydro sources, it does have less of an adverse effect on the natural world than gas or wood.

To balance our use of propane we have a tankless water heater that is one of the most environmentally friendly options available for off-grid set ups. It provides hot water only as it is needed.

If we look at the total footprint of our propane, its 0.19. That works out at 0.001 tonnes of CO2e per stay. We make sure that we add it up over the course of a year and reinvest into schemes to support carbon-saving initiatives.

Protecting water

As water scarcity and drought conditions persist globally, we are all being encouraged to think of reusing of greywater. We need to use our resources wisely.

Our compost toilet saves a massive 4-13 litres of water in a regular flush toilet. It does this by separating the solids and liquids, which removes the odours and means we don’t need a flush.

Composting the solids kills harmful pathogens but the nutrients remain. The result is an organic compost that feeds the soil as well as the plants. In the past this ‘night soil’ was highly coveted. These days we don’t like to think about what happens to our poo, but perhaps we should.

At the same time, we are saving carbon by removing the need for treatment. The carbon cost of potable water treatment is much higher than it need be, because we treat much more water to potable standards than we need to.

With no black water in our system (from the toilet) we can also use our greywater to irrigate the fields. We have built a filtration system that clears the debris and allows us to support the biodiversity around us.

Eco heating

Heating that uses hot air is highly inefficient. As infrared heats the material in the room, rather than the air, it uses less energy. It also has less heat loss. We have installed it throughout the cabin to keep your feet warm in winter.

Our heating aims extended to our log burner too. We love the feel of a cosy fire but burning wood has its issues. We chose a bioethanol rather to balance the feel with a cleaner fuel. Bioethanol is a renewable energy source produced by a sugar fermentation process. There’s no smoke and no carbon released. Our burner adds nothing to the environment and takes nothing from it either. What it does do is make for a very cosy living space!

When you couple all that with our double-glazing and sheep’s wool insulation, we have an efficient space with no carbon impact.

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Tags eco, Sustainability

Sustainability

Secret Cabin Bookcase Doors

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 28 September 2023

A door, a secret bookcase.

A secret cabin bookcase: books revived!

How we built a secret cabin bookcase door from unwanted books

Rethinking waste part 2: books

In Rethinking Waste: pencils we talked about what happens to day-to-day items when you have a surplus. All too often we assume can recycle something when in actual fact, we can’t.

This article tackles something a little trickier. Books. What happens when we no longer want the literature that has adorned our bookshelves for years?

For most people, the first option is the charity shop. But this isn’t always the solution you think it is.

And what about recycling? Books are paper…. or are they?

The story behind the secret cabin door

When we designed the cabin, we spoke to our kids about how we could make the children’s bunk room cool. They immediately knew – a secret bookcase door.

Through FB marketplace I came across a lady whose father-in-law was going into care. He had collected books his whole life and had a huge bookcase of ex-library books and old hardback history and travel books that she had no idea what to do with. We collected them and started working on our design.

And then we hit a snag..

Books are heavy and the door was huge. In order to turn the kid’s vision into reality, we would have to reduce the weight and size of the project and this could only be achieved by chopping up the books to make them two-thirds of the size.

That felt very wrong.

People have strong feelings about books. All those words that somebody wrote and all that time they spent creating their masterpiece. And the impact: a book has the power to inspire you, give you clarity, even change or challenge your assumptions about life. Chopping them up felt disrespectful.

Aware that we would have to abandon our plan for a secret bookcase, I spent a day trying to get rid of all the books I had accumulated. Some of them had beautiful covers and looked to have value, so I catalogued, photographed and researched the collection before sending the images to booksellers who appeared to deal in the relevant areas.

I was told categorically by all of them that they had absolutely no value and were not wanted. Send them to a charity shop.

I contacted charity shops, but with the current trend to de-clutter, and the rise of e-readers replacing physical books, they didn’t want all of my books. Some may have been accepted, but I had hundreds. If you think about it, it’s obvious. Storage is at a premium and charity shops only really want stock they can sell. And what sells is not always what is most popular. The Daily Telegraph reported that after the initial buzz about Fifty Shades of Grey, Cancer Research UK found that for every donated book they sold, “they (would) get two donations in its place… People are offloading them now in droves …its becoming a paper mountain”. They stopped accepting them.

There are of course online booksellers. Ziffit, for example. takes books. You can scan them in and may even make some money from Ziffit. Be aware they only want “good, readable condition” though. If they are annotated, damaged, missing a dust jacket, ex-rental or missing supplements, they get sent off for recycling. The same applies for webuybooks.

Recycle now says “Books cannot usually be recycled at kerbside along with other paper recycling because of the glue that’s used to bind them.”

So if charity shops don’t want them, Ziffit won’t take them and they can’t be recycled, what next?

Feel Good holiday

The Vacationist has been converted with the environment in mind. Lovingly hand-crafted by carpenters and creatives searching to reduce the carbon impact of holidays, the cabin is the perfect balance of comfort, escapism and eco- solutions.

Fabulous Location

Nestled in a private meadow, The Vacationist offers access to hiking, biking, spas, kids activities and lovely pubs! It is also next to Crockstead Fields – a festival and wedding site for those who are attending an event and don’t fancy roughing it in a tent!

things to do

Hike or bike the hills and cliffs; enjoy the ambience, food and drink of the local villages; immerse yourself in seaside fun; explore acres of Grade I listed landscaped garden and lakes at Sheffield Park or get your adrenaline fix at Branching Out Adventures.

A new chapter for old books

I started to wonder if perhaps we should rethink what a book’s purpose is. We are long gone from the days in which only one manuscript was written – when books really were sacred. If I took what I wrote above – about inspiration and challenging assumptions – I realised that we could keep the power of books alive by rethinking the way in which we used them.

Our bookcase idea was created by our kids because we have brought them up to read books. They were engaged and inspired by stories of secret bookcases and hidden dens. I had told them it wasn’t possible because we couldn’t cut up books, but now I realised that there was really no place for old books to go to die and perhaps they might actual fulfil their purpose by adorning our door in a more slimline form.

Creating our secret bookshelf door

I won’t lie – it felt very wrong bringing the saw down.

We took the books that were damaged or that we believed would not sell and methodically cut them into two-third versions of their former selves. We glued them into position (for safety).

The only book we bought during the process was “The Secret Door”… we wanted something that might grab a child’s attention and this was the perfect clue.

In place, the bookshelf looks amazing. But what is even better is the reaction we have had from young people. Their eyes light up with magic when they discover the secret.

When they go inside, they find books on adventuring and stories of the world, activity books and tales of how we can help the planet. They curl up and dive right into them. Our literary door has set the tone to a weekend of escapism, inspiration and creativity.

And isn’t that what books are all about?

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Tags secret bookshelf, Sustainability

Sustainability

Rethinking waste: pencils

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 27 September 2023

Rethinking waste: pencils

Creating an epoxy kitchen countertop from unwanted pencils

Rethinking waste

What happens to old things when you don’t want them any more? It’s all too easy to drop them off at a charity shop or put them in the recycling box and forget all about them. But what really happens to our waste?

We tried to think about this during the build, not just to save money and waste in general, but also to pose questions to our guests about what happens to the things they throw away. What do we do with the things that cannot be reused or repurposed. Where do the materials we use every day come from, where do they go when we are finished with them and is there a way we reuse them by rethinking their purpose?

Reduce, reuse, recycle… it’s all good stuff, but we want to add a new R for RETHINK.

Stay at the cabin to see our Epoxy Pencil Kitchen countertop in its full glory, and much more! See the cabin in full here.

It takes 82,000 trees to support the global demand for pencils

According to the Guardian, the pencil was once judged by Forbes magazine to be the fourth most important tool in human history… after the knife, the abacus and the compass. 14 billion are made per year. That’s a phenomenal amount of product.

But are they all in use? If you are anything like us, you have probably accrued hundreds over the years. Kid’s parties, pizza restaurants, corporate giveaways, pocket-money trips to Smiggle to buy something that smells like either tangerine or melon…. One pencil case has no doubt morphed into several, it’s become a box, it’s become a whole drawer.

So what happens to those pencils you no longer need or want?

Recycling pencils

Pencils are made of wood with a graphite, or coloured core (which is made by combining wax and/or oil, water, bonding agents, and pigments). They sometimes have a metal ferrule with a rubber on the end, and typically they are painted on the outside.

All of those things are recyclable, but like many products, the fact they are combined is problematic. They need to be stripped down to their component parts to effectively recycle them. Not only is that time-consuming, it only works if they are made from all-natural materials.

Pencils are often made cheaply with poor product. They might come wrapped in sparkly plastic, have glue mixed in with the clay or use synthetic rubber. That effectively makes them unrecyclable and curbside recycling won’t take them.

What about the alternatives? Well there isn’t really any. In the UK Terracycle offer pencil recycling, but they only take mechanical pencils. The same goes for Rymans.

If you want to use your old pencils, you need to RETHINK AND GET CREATIVE!

Creating an epoxy kitchen worktop

When we built our first project – Skoolie Stays – we created a kitchen counter out of old pennies and halfpennies set into epoxy. It looked incredible and so we decided that we’d tackle pencil waste in the same way.

We put a shout out on our local school Facebook Page and began a collection for people’s old pencils. They came in all shapes and sizes.

Each pencil was chopped down into a 1cm nub before being glued to a wooden base. It took several days and 2014 pencils to cover the entire piece. We then poured epoxy in several layers, sanding back each time to expose the pencils, before the final pour that created a glossy finish.