Sustainability

Sustainability at Five Elements

Our Carbon Neutral Mission

Want to make sure your stay in Frankfurt is as sustainable as possible? We’re proud of our efforts to create a carbon neutral hostel. Read on to see how we’re doing this!

If you’re worried about how your travels impact the planet, you can sleep soundly with us. We’re collectively doing what we can to minimise ours and your environmental impact.

Making your stay carbon neutral* is what we can do to help you travel with a small carbon footprint. In regards to our hostels’ energy and gas consumption, we are Co2 neutral, which is arguably the best way for us to help the environment. And while there’s still Co2 in the products we use, we’re making daily efforts to reduce this by choosing local or carbon neutral suppliers.

What We’ve Achieved So Far

For example, in 2021 alone, we were able to save 80 tons of Co2 from our electricity and gas bills, and compensated the following 3 NGOs:

Project Wings – this German founded organisation works locally, as well as in Indonesia, to recycle plastic waste, educate locals, and protect the rainforest.

Moor Futures – a local German project which preserves natural landscapes.

Atmosfair – they are huge and cost effective. Without them we would not have had the funds to compensate completely.

We believe investing in these 3 NGO makes a bigger impact than if we did other things. Because at the end of the day, how sustainable is it to change all windows to better insulated ones? Seems wasteful if you ask us.

Why Compensation and Not Reduction?

We asked ourselves how we could make the biggest impact with the funds available. As our consumption is quite optimised and changing our gas heating was not possible, we could only change our mix of electricity to greener options. While the term ‘green energy’ sounds great, it’s effectively a green washing term as it doesn’t actually increase Germany’s sustainable energy output. By definition, it means that some consume green energy, and others dirty energy. This is why we chose not to make the switch. We take the mix of both, and compensate for our usage of dirty energy.

And while we aren’t able to switch entirely from gas, we were able to reduce our consumption by using the waste energy from our AC system.

Even though it would have been cheaper and easier, we decided for compensation over switching to a Green energy tariff. We strongly believe our choice to compensate over building an entirely new system is the right one for us, as well as the planet.

Our Carbon Neutral Mission

We hope these efforts have made you look favourably upon our efforts, and we encourage you to reach out to us on the topic! Do you have any suggestions? Or do you have any questions? Either way, let us know by sending us an email at welcome@5elementshostel.de. Alternatively, you can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram!