A co-produced business idea at Elysium’s Aberbeeg Hospital has seen ‘growing’ success! As part of an ongoing passion for sustainability at Aberbeeg, a group of the people supported at the service decided they wanted to bring a local ‘flavour’ to the teas on offer in the hospital’s café by blending homegrown teas using herbs they’ve planted themselves.
They set about creating a growing initiative – including creating planters from scratch – before planting herbs such as fennel, chamomile and mint, drying the leaves and making teas from them.
These homegrown teas have been an incredibly popular menu item at the café, and have also brought success in the Elysium gardening competition ‘Can You Dig It?’.
The project has created a great deal of pride for the people involved.
Aberbeeg Hospital Director Jessica Jones said: “The project is a huge source of pride. The people we support enjoy taking visitors to see, and smell, the plants they have grown. For those to be put to such good use by creating delicious drinks is wonderful.
“We have a strong focus on sustainability at Aberbeeg. We have a compost heap where all of our uncooked food waste goes. We also have donkeys onsite, whose manure is a useful addition to the compost. They offer real-life work opportunities as people are paid to look after them
“Myself and one of our colleagues in the maintenance team have been doing a bee-keeping course. We are going to get bees and hope to have honey by the end of the summer. This is something we hope will encourage people to be more curious about the environment. We’ll be planting more bee-friendly flowers and we’re reducing mowing the grass so much – just little things we can do to be more sustainable and environmentally friendly as a service.
“Our Quality Assurance Lead Jamie Lee Barnard is also working on a project to have the menus we have not only include the calories, but also the carbon footprint of each of the choices included. We’re making adjustments to the menu which will also hopefully encourage people to choose more sustainable options – for example, vegetarian choices tend to have a lower carbon footprint.
“Even from a building perspective, we do what we can in terms of sustainability at Aberbeeg, including using air source heat pumps and using rainwater to flush the loos wherever we can.
“People think environmental awareness is all about recycling, but there’s lots more to it than that. At Aberbeeg, we’re always thinking about how we can enhance our positive environmental impact through sustainable practices.”
