Eco

Ivythwaite Cottages


We declare a Climate Emergency

We’ve signed up to Tourism Declares, an initiative that supports tourism businesses, organisations and individuals in declaring a climate emergency and taking purposeful action to reduce their carbon emissions as per the advice from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030.

Like all signatories, we have committed to the following five actions:

1. Develop a ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ within the next 12 months, which sets out our intentions to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade.

2. Share an initial public declaration of our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’, and update on progress each year.

3. Accept current IPCC advice stating the need to cut global carbon emissions to 55% below 2017 levels by 2030 in order to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming. We’ll ensure our ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ represents actions designed to achieve this as a minimum, through delivering transparent, measurable and increasing reductions in the total carbon emissions per customer arising from our operations and the travel services sold by us.

4. Encourage our suppliers and partners to make the same declaration; sharing best practice amongst peers; and actively participate in the Tourism Declares community

5. Advocate for change. We recognise the need for system change across the industry to accelerate a just transition towards carbon-free tourism.

Ten Green Steps - our pledges to promote sustainable tourism.


  1. We offer a designated parking space in our private car park with free EV charging to guests with an electric or hybrid vehicle.
  2. We offer complimentary luggage storage in advance of check in and after check out for guests travelling to Windermere by train or bus.
  3. We encourage guests to explore the Lake District on foot and/or by public transport. Our ‘Walks from Ivythwaite’ information sheets are available in our cottages and on our website with further maps and guides available on request. We encourage guests to make use of the local Stagecoach bus services, to explore the lakes using the services of Windermere Lake Cruises, Coniston Cruises and Ullswater Steamers, and to experience the Lakeland fells on a Mountain Goat guided tour.
  4. The produce on our breakfast menu is homemade or locally sourced from suppliers in the South Lakes. All our bread and cakes are freshly home baked. We grow some of the fruit, vegetables and herbs that we serve. Our free range eggs are from Bannerigg Farm, less than 1km from Windermere.
  5. We are striving to eliminate single use products. The water, milk, cake, jams, honeys and cereals we offer are provided in reusable glass or ceramic containers. We provide hand wash, shower gel/shampoo and moisturiser in refillable dispensers, sourced from a supplier in the nearby Eden Valley.
  6. We encourage our guests to reuse their bath and hand towels. We monitor our water use carefully. Laundry accounts for 16 % of our water use when using our washing machine’s ‘eco’ setting. All our guest rooms have heated towel rails for drying wet towels. Remember that once you have taken a bath or shower, you are clean!
  7. We recycle all our waste paper, cardboard, glass and plastic. Our menus and room information are printed on recycled paper. Our waste bin liners are compostable. Our food waste is composted.
  8. We monitor our energy use carefully to ensure we are efficient in our use. We programme our lighting, heating and hot water using smart sensors and meters. We use LED light bulbs as well as solar and motion sensing outside lighting.
  9. We encourage guests to charge mobile phones using the USB sockets in the bedside alarm clocks.
  10. We are working with Cumbria Tourism and Green Tourism to monitor and evaluate our current practices. We have a development plan outlining our green targets and the future actions we need to take to achieve these targets.

Click here for Ivythwaite Cottage's current green policy

Ivythwaite Cottages partners with Ecologi


We have recently started working in partnership with Ecologi to become a climate positive organisation. Ecologi are a fantastic environmental organisation which fund climate projects around the world. Although our partnership is a new one, we can already boast -

  • one month operating with a climate positive workforce
  • 1.77 tonnes of carbon reduction
  • 34 new trees planted in Madagascar, Mozambique and Nicaragua
  • funding for offshore wind energy production in Taiwan
  • funding for forest protection schemes in Zimbabwe

Our initial goals are 10 tonnes of carbon reduction and 100 new trees planted.

We would encourage everyone to look at the Ecologi website, take a look at what they are doing and sign up to be climate positive.