Things to do and see Guest Rooms Inn History and Tour Published Articles Eco-Friendly Practices Prices and Directions

~Thorn Run Inn~ Eco-friendly Practices ~~~ "Nestled at the foot of Knobley Mountain is a place for people who hunger for country quiet." The Charleston Gazette ~~~ Much like our winding roads through the mountains, developing  an eco-friendly business is an attempt to navigate a landscape in a way that fits the natural contours.  It may not seem to be the most direct, but in the long run, it is the safest and expresses our sense of stewardship.  Below are some of the practices we employ, and a more detailed account of our approach to just one little part--coffee. Comments  are welcome!  Home

One of our primary goals is to demonstrate that one can build a livelihood while conserving the environment.  We work hard to ensure 1) that a visit to Thorn Run Inn has less of a negative environmental impact that a visit elsewhere, and 2) that guests come here with this in mind.  Doing this in a customer-oriented, resource-limited context has proven to be a challenge!  However, we have found support in the form of helpful information from our guests, colleagues, and a number of books including The Green Kitchen Handbook (HarperPerennial) and The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists (Three Rivers Press).

Here at Thorn Run Inn

• We use compost piles that receive vegetable waste from the kitchen, yard, and garden.
• We use recycled and recyclable products in our business whenever possible. For example we use post consumer recycled paper in our marketing, and in our rural area with limited recycling facilities we go to lengths to recycle our glass, plastic, and metal--in fact volunteers are welcome to take a bag of bottles home with them. The sorting process is pictured above.
• The breakfasts we serve are flavorful as nature intended--made with as many organically produced ingredients as possible. We buy as much food as we can through a local coop that is supplied by Frankferd Farms, an organic food coop near Pittsburgh.
• We run our Inn with the assistance of gas-stingy cars.
• We use eco-friendly consumables like biodegradable cleaners.  Our current favorites are Bi-O-Kleen, Ecover, and Earth Friendly Products.
• We choose suppliers based on the quantity and nature of their products' packaging, and the claims they make on environmental concerns.
• We have drastically decreased the size of our lawn and we completely avoid the use of chemical pesitides and fertilizers, much to the benefit of the birds.
• We use locally-grown, locally milled non-treated wood for construction and repairs almost exclusively.
• We consider toxic ingredients and VOCs when buying polishes, paints and other finishes.  Case in point--our office consists of an unfinished shed that we completed with extensive use of scavenged wood, including some beautiful pieces of old walnut and chestnut.  The bare wood is unfinished and the sheetrock is primed and painted with low VOC latex.

We hosted and were the primary sponsor for the "Growing the Business of Ecotourism in West Virginia" conference in November of 1999.  This conference drew 39 participants from the private sector, local, state, and federal government, and the non-profit sector. You can click here to view a never-to-be-finished draft proceedings from this conference.  More recently we were one of many participants in "Sustaining Wild and Wonderful: Best Practices in Sustainable Tourism" conference. Click here to get at a copy of the proceedings from this conference. You can also read "A Primer on Ecotourism" we wrote for The Appalachian Journal.  Finally, we are a founding member of the West Virginia Ecotourism Association, a small but growing band of progressive businesses scattered across West Virginia.  For people interested in learning more about ecotourism in general, you will find Ron Madder's work and the related links a good place to start.

And last but not least, where we need to improve.  Our primary concern here is energy consumption.  Our house is not well insulated, and the old windows are not tight.  As a result, keeping the house warm in the winter consumes way more wood and heating oil that would be the case otherwise.  In a sense, we recycled an entire house through use of the existing structure, but we are eating into this "savings" every year.  As of this writing we are in the process of outfitting the house with new storm windows, and we are beefing up the insulation by hand using 100% recycled cellulose.  To further balance our winter energy consumption we provide window fans to keep the rooms comfortable in the summer.  These fans produce completely satisfactory results, thanks in part to our cool mountain evenings, while consuming 80 to 90 percent less energy than air conditioners.
And what about coffee?  As people actively trying to minimize the environmental impact of our business, and who really appreciate good coffee, it seemed obvious that we should buy organically produced gourmet coffee.  Then a guest mentioned that he doesn't drink coffee because of the plantation-type method of producing it.  Having seen plantations in the tropics firsthand we had to acknowledge that coffee, even shade-grown, is hardly ever good, or even neutral, for the environment.  We thought about this until we fell asleep around mid-morning...  Despite its negative impacts, the reality was that we needed to continue to serve coffee.  We settled on Organic Bolivian sold by Equal Exchange.  Not only was it excellent, and organic, but it claims to pass a greater portion of the sale price back to the producers.  We felt good about this choice until I watched a large brown UPS truck arrive one day to drop it off.  Depending on the day's route, we could be nothing more than a run up our driveway for this delivery, or we could be a 40-mile round trip.  I realized that in the interest of environmental conservation we could be burning an awful lot of gas.  So do we continue to support this amazing coffee that comes via UPS, or do we go with the pretty good stuff we can find in the local supermarket?  Send us your thoughts, or come on buy to find out what we are currently doing.  In the meantime, this is just one example of the tradeoffs we end up balancing all the time at Thorn Run Inn.  Thank you for your interest!