Istvan Fekete - Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Mercure hotels across Australia have gone green on conferencing, with the hotel group being among the first to offer a national Carbon Neutral Conferencing product.

Under the Mercure Meetings initiative, Mercure hotels will fully fund offsets for carbon emissions produced during the conference. This means the offset cost of making a conference Carbon Neutral is covered by the hotel, not the conference group. This cost covers the greenhouse gases produced during the meeting and the offset is used to fund green-efficient energy sources at no extra cost to the conference group.

Mercure has teamed with the Carbon Reduction Institute to streamline the carbon offsetting process. The Institute's Carbon Calculator determines the amount of carbon emissions created by a conference, and calculates the amount of credits to be purchased from emission reduction projects or carbon trading schemes, such as the replacement of inefficient lighting and technologies with more efficient products, and replacing the use of electricity with natural gas in both domestic and business environments.

Each credit represents a reduction of emissions equivalent to 1 tonne of CO2 and is registered through the New South Wales Greenhouse abatement scheme. In addition, 10% of all revenue collected from the purchase of these credits is donated to CleanUp Australia in support of their clean up our climate program.

The eco-factor is not new to the Mercure brand however. All hotels in their portfolio across Australia follow Accor's global environmental charter with 20 priority actions identified to reduce energy and water consumption and improve waste management and recycling.