At Treseren, sustainability has always been at the heart of what we do. From the outset, we set out to balance people, planet and profit to create a sustainable and vibrant business – giving back to people, our environment and local economy.
As well as our immediate natural environment, we care deeply about the global challenges that we are all facing. We are one small business in Cornwall, but there is an encouraging statistic – for the majority of society to change, just 25% of people must change their behaviour. This inspires us to continue on our sustainability journey and provide transparency in all that we do. The whole team feels passionately about our role in looking after our environment now and for the future.
What can we do?
A green, eco-friendly wedding is a challenge to achieve. At Treseren, we specialise in small weddings and host a maximum number of 22 guests. We know that intimate, small weddings are by their very nature more sustainable: the fewer the guests, the lower the carbon footprint of travel, the less waste to landfill, and so on. Equally, for UK couples, a ‘destination wedding’ is possible without getting on a plane, when the breathtaking Cornwall scenery is right on your doorstep. This is why Treseren weddings take place over a two or three night stay, so that couples and their guests can enjoy a Cornish adventure.
We are determined to build on this head start, and explore all the other areas that we can reduce our carbon emissions. We take seriously our responsibility to create magical weddings that tread as lightly as possible on the environment. We want to work with our couples and suppliers to achieve this goal.
Our Sustainable Journey
We always reduce, reuse and recycle wherever possible. On a day-to-day basis we reduce the amount of new materials we use, and throughout the venue we reuse wherever possible. From the vintage and antique furniture that fills the house, to the refillable glass water bottles in each bedroom. We are strong believers that sustainability and style can go hand in hand – we had great fun scouring the Southwest for the best 1920’s pieces to create Loveday’s Bar!
Recycling is one of the easiest ways to lower our environmental impact and all of our cardboard, paper, plastic and tin waste is carefully cleaned and sorted regularly. There is inevitably a certain amount of leftover materials after each wedding and we carefully either reuse, rehome or recycle these with specific systems in place. For example, we save all of our leftover candle wax which Dean from Chef in My Home collects and reuses.
In 2024 we plan to introduce a Bokashi composting system for recycling kitchen waste, and cutting organic matter from our general waste. The environmental benefits include producing nutrient rich byproducts, which acts as fertiliser. Compared to normal composting, a wider array of kitchen waste products can be fermented before adding to soil, including meat, dairy and citrus, all of which make up a substantial proportion of our food waste.
For younger visitors, we were delighted to work with a great Cornish business to create our wooden adventure playground at the bottom of the gardens, using sustainable natural materials. Our climbing frame was made from a sweet chestnut tree planted 40 years ago. This tree was strategically planted as a ‘nurse tree’, to protect and then make way for the oak trees planted alongside it, so it was always planned to be felled during this time frame in line with the practice of Silviculture.
We have an electric car ourselves, and have an EV charging point available for guests to recharge at Treseren. Over a year, one electric car can save an average of 1.5 million grams of carbon dioxide! We are really aware of the positive changes that can be made in relation to our energy use in the venue and are carefully researching achievable goals that can be met within the restrictions of a Grade II listed building. Replacing existing systems with renewable energies in the future is an exciting prospect that we will continually and actively work towards.
Sustainable Wedding Alliance
We are proud members of the Sustainable Wedding Alliance, becoming fully certified in February 2024. The Sustainable Wedding Alliance’s mission is to drive change in our industry, raising awareness and tackling climate change and attitudes, by proactively encouraging businesses to develop future thinking strategies and make responsible decisions. Our certification is a direct result of our commitment to environmental and social sustainability at Treseren and we strongly value this partnership.
Locally Sourced Food and Drink
Great food and drink is a huge part of a wedding celebration at Treseren, from the convivial sharing feast that we serve as a welcome the evening before a wedding day, to the breakfast spreads that we so enjoy creating on each morning of a Treseren stay. The origin of each ingredient used in both the kitchen and Loveday’s Bar is carefully considered and reflected in our seasonal menus that celebrate the fruits and vegetables that are available in the UK at different times of the year and are delivered to us from local suppliers.
Where possible, we have taken the opportunity to grow and make some produce at Treseren, eliminating food miles, packaging, and processing emissions. We grow our own edible flowers which garnish our cocktails and have a flourishing herb garden that services both the bar and kitchen. We have recently introduced Treseren honey, swapping shop bought honey used in our ‘Tin Miner’s Daughter’ cocktail, for honey produced by bees kept by Paul at Treseren. This delicious honey has zero food miles and has a unique flavour, with hints of the ivy and verbena in our gardens, which the bees love. From Falmouth based Lovedays Gin to Rosemullion Spice Rum, we have always been really proud of offering incredible Cornish artisan spirits. We are constantly reviewing and trying to improve our local sourcing and we were delighted to discover our newest stockist – our house vodka is made by Colwith Farm with waste potatoes and their distillery is powered by renewable energy – the refillable bottles are even delivered to us in an electric van.
We have always made our own sugar syrups for use in cocktails as well as making our own granola for the breakfast table, a recipe that Emma and Paul established when they ran a five star bed and breakfast in Padstow. We are delighted to celebrate the apples from our orchard at the breakfast table with our very own Treseren apple juice, an exciting project that prevents food waste, creating a regenerative cycle with our own produce. Our 100% pure apple juice is pressed in Cornwall using traditional methods and the empty bottles are washed and reused for each autumn to come.
We were delighted to win the award for the best Sustainable Supply Chain at the 2024 Sustainable Wedding Industry Awards
Treseren Wedding Day Supplier Family
We are inspired by the brilliant small businesses we work with who share our values and have become an extended part of the Treseren family. Their approach and ethos aligns to the principles we hold to create small and beautiful weddings that deliver quality, creativity and style, as well as prioritising a dedication to sustainability. Our Little Black Book of recommended suppliers offers couples environmentally responsible options for their special day.
Here are some wonderful examples of the brilliant suppliers who visit Treseren regularly –
‘Sustainability is at the heart of my business and I use flowers grown here at Three Acre for weddings and events, grown organically without the use of chemicals in the most sustainable way I can’.
‘If I need to supplement my flowers I will always use British flowers, grown either by a local grower, who grows in the same way as I do or another British supplier and grower who cares about the provenance of the flowers they sell.
By using flowers grown here at Three Acre, in such close proximity to Treseren, I can ensure that I’m focussing on seasonality and sustainability while ensuring that, as nature intended, the flowers are at their best. We use no dig methods in our growing, and the land around it we don’t cultivate. We don’t use any machinery – it’s very much wild and left alone. It can look a bit untidy but it’s the best for pollinators.
This also means that genuinely your flower miles are very low, as we never import flowers. Usually, Holland or Kenya is where most wedding flowers come from, these flowers have been grown on a mass scale, using a wide variety of chemicals, with flowers bred for longevity and robustness (allowing them to travel 1000’s of miles out of water in an aeroplane) – often at the sacrifice of scent and most definitely to the detriment of the environment. Aside from the obvious benefits of having beautiful smelling, organically grown flowers, by growing the flowers, I can choose some really special varieties to grow, that simply aren’t available from the international flower markets, and that really does give my work a unique wild and naturalistic look which is not achievable when using imported flowers. My arrangements are created without the use of floral foam and using sustainable and low waste methods. I absolutely hate waste and will always suggest ways in which arrangements can be repurposed during your wedding day to ensure you get the best value out of the flowers. Once your day is over, I encourage you to take as many flowers with you as possible, and those that you can’t carry, are brought back to the farm and composted and we use this compost to grow the following year’s flowers – a real circular approach to things!
We feel so lucky to be able to live here and to grow flowers and food organically for our family. We have a small flock of chickens who provide us with fantastic free range organic eggs and lots of lovely chicken manure that feeds our land. I genuinely love working with Treseren, a venue which shares my core values towards sustainability and seasonality in their entire approach to their brilliant business.’
‘When we first started our Chef in My Home journey, we were already on the path to sustainability without even realising it! Not liking the way food was being mass produced with more thought going into quantity not quality, we were not comfortable eating food that had very little health benefits or flavour, but that was also harming the world in which we live. With this in mind, we thought if we are not happy with eating this kind of food how could we be happy serving it to our customers! So, what started as 1 polytunnel and a couple of raised beds for ourselves soon turned into growing as much as we could to use for the business as well as sourcing from small local companies.
Another step to sustainability is the ability for our customers to preorder, as this greatly cuts down on food wastage. Any scraps we do have, like vegetable peelings, eggshells etc are composted. We even make our own vegetable stock cubes using veg peelings, dehydrating them and making a dry powder stock.’
‘With the family farm only 3 miles away from Treseren, the whole field to plate concept is truly achievable and fits in perfectly our work life ethos.’
‘Sustainability is extremely important to me, I endeavour to be as eco-conscious as possible within my business. My USB boxsets are handmade by a local carpenter and produced from a sustainable woodland in Cornwall, I fill these with hand dried petals from my friend’s farm in Dorset, which I collect when I am visiting family. At the beginning of the 2023 wedding season, I managed to secure a partnership with a local eco park in Cornwall, in a bid to plant one tree for every wedding I photograph. In a climate crisis, I feel it is our responsibility as business owners to do as much as we can for our climate footprint.’
‘I am incredibly conscious of the environment and our impact on it, which is why I do things the way I do. Sustainability is a word that gets used a great deal, but I am doing everything I can to ensure my methods and practices are as sustainable and environmentally conscious as possible. Unlike a restaurant, I only order and make exactly what I need for each booking. I do not carry a surplus of ingredients that will eventually find their way into the rubbish if they cannot be used. I make everything from scratch, from ice creams to breads; from kimchi to curry pastes. If I am left with any unusable food scraps, they do not go to waste, but are added to our compost heap, which in turn, fertilises our organic nano-holding.
We all know that good food begins with fantastic quality ingredients. I source produce from local suppliers and producers to find the freshest and best quality ingredients I can. I design my menus around ingredients that are in season. When the garden and greenhouse are being productive, I like to use a lot of our own home grown produce, including herbs, edible flowers, soft fruits and eggs from my chooks. When it comes to foraging, I only pick tiny amounts of what I need to use as flavour accents, from tried and tested locations I have found to have healthy supplies. If it is rare or not thriving, I leave well alone. I am taking the greatest level of care and consideration I can to ensure I keep my carbon footprint as small as possible.’
‘My approach is permaculture based; with three aims; Earth Care, People Care and Fair share. At Brookside Flower Farm, we have created a rich, healthy, living landscape where many species of wildlife make their home amongst the diverse range of flowers, fruits and leaves that nourish them. Not just butterflies, bees and pollinating insects, but many mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles are all as much a part of the community.
I am proud to be a foam free florist, all the flower arrangements I create are placed in sustainable moss. One block of floral foam contains as much plastic as 10 plastic bags, as well as formaldehyde and phenolic foam, both of which are toxic. It is not biodegradable, cannot be recycled and when it ends up in landfill, it ultimately breaks down into smaller microplastics.’
Sustainable Conversation
These are just some of the ways that we are working towards lessening our carbon footprint, you can read our full sustainability policy here. We welcome conversation with like-minded individuals who are looking to make a positive impact on people and the planet, as sharing knowledge is the best way we can all improve.
Please email our Sustainability Coordinator Charlie if you would like to talk about Treseren’s sustainability journey.
