Hyvärilä is a Green Key certified youth and tourism center, located on the shore of Lake Pielinen in North Karelia. Location determines our involvement in the international Green Key environmental program. It means that we are working to develop sustainable tourism by reducing the environmental impact of our overnight stays and preserving nature.
Learn more: What is Green Key?
What do we want?
We want to continue living in the pristine nature also in the future. We want to make sure that future generations also get to the find forest hills full of blueberries, fish striped perch from lake Pielinen, and sometimes take a dip in its fresh waves. Here at Hyvärilä, our daily lives include taking care of the environment, and we always strive to be more sustainable and ecological.
What do we do?
Our mission requires environmentally friendly choices from each of us: we train our employees and guide our customers. As a youth center, we want to promote the environmental awareness especially among the young generation. We want to use our own example to encourage everyone else to act ecologically.
In Hyvärilä, we constantly increase selection of organic products and local food. For example, our coffee is fair trade sourced and our printing paper is eco-labeled. We use eco-labeled products for cleaning as well. We measure the amount of food waste with a waste scale daily and keep our customers aware about it.
We let each person clearly see how many grams of uneaten food they throw into biowaste every day, we hope that next time they will be able to choose differently and pay attention to their habits. For us, in turn, measuring wasted food reveals the foods that cause the most waste. According to it, we can change our menus.
We make conscious choices to save energy: we adjusted the water flow to the ideal level to save water. We inform our customers about linen and towel change intervals and room cleaning. The solar panels on roof of the manor hotel collect energy, which is utilized directly to power the building. We collect the waste heat generated in the kitchen and use it for heating.
Hyvärilä's environmental friendliness starts with the small deeds that are part of us and the way we operate.
Hyvärilä educates
Hyvärilä is a youth and tourism center, and most of our customers are young people from Finland and around the world. That is why our programs include a red line of environmental education: we pass on information about the wonders of nature, the secrets of recycling, and our potential to contribute to climate change. In Hyvärilä young people can experience nature in nature.
We use muscle power when rowing and paddling, snowshoeing and skiing, climbing and descending. We do international youth work. We promote multiculturalism, tolerance and equality. Overcoming all kinds of borders is an everyday task for us.
