Under this title, Mr Ulrich Stolte of the Stuttgarter Zeitung wrote an article on 28 July 2017 about the award ceremony for our hotel.
At the Ecoinn on Kanalstraße in Esslingen, you can lay your head to rest without an environmental guilty conscience.
Esslingen – The Ecoinn hotel on Esslingen’s Kanalstraße can now call itself the most ecological hotel in the whole of Europe. On Thursday, Baden-Württemberg’s Environment Minister Franz Untersteller brought a so-called carbon footprint to the hotel as a certificate, confirming that the hotel on Esslingen’s Kanalstraße produces sensationally little CO2. Per overnight stay, it is only around 3.16 kilograms. By comparison, a night in a conventional hotel without eco standards produces more than eight kilograms of CO2.
A water wheel in the basement
Thomas Puchan is helped not only by the water wheel installed in the basement of his hotel, which supplies the building and the municipal power grid with electricity. He offers a waste-free breakfast, uses fully ecological cleaning products and much more. Again and again he talks to his staff to find out together where CO2 can still be saved. For this team of eco-musketeers he has coined the motto, loosely based on Alexandre Dumas: “One for all, and all for the environment.”
In addition, Thomas Puchan is active in various trade associations to spread the idea of ecological hotels in the industry, which have their own umbrella organisation in the Green Line Hotels, for example. “If everyone does something within their means to avoid carbon dioxide, we will all be a big step further,” says the hotelier.
It is getting hot in Baden-Württemberg
With a series of figures and examples, Environment Minister Franz Untersteller explained the effects of climate change, by which Baden-Württemberg is particularly affected. In the state between the Rhine and the Alps, the average temperature has risen by 1.3 degrees since 1880, significantly more than global warming over this period, which amounts to 0.85 degrees Celsius. “In Karlsruhe we now have temperatures like those in Lyon 70 years ago.” The number of hot days has doubled in recent years, and apple blossom now starts on average 13 days earlier than over the past 50 years. In addition, the amount of rainfall is increasing sharply.
This has some dramatic consequences: floods cause billions in damage. Because crops blossom early and late frosts still occur, there are considerable crop failures, as there were this year.
Turning to the hoteliers present at the Ecoinn on Thursday, Untersteller said that climate change affects all areas of life, including tourism. Skiing holidays in the northern Black Forest will soon be a thing of the past, with skiing only in the higher southern Black Forest, but even there its days are numbered. Travel, and especially air travel, produces a great deal of CO2.
But even this amount can be reduced, said the minister, by supporting climate projects or by choosing a hotel with high ecological standards. In general, he is not concerned with doing without things, but with using them consciously.