After receiving a complaint from the Prince of Wales that the watercourse in one of his fields was being polluted by the hotel sewage, the hotel took a decision to check its green credentials.

At present, the Hare and Hounds Hotel at Westonbirt-the family-owned, privately run three-star hotel with 45-bedrooms, has the distinction of being the first Gloucestershire hotel to win a silver award from the Green Tourism Business Scheme, for its pledge to sustainable tourism.

It was the year 2006, when the hotel took its first step in the process of going green started.

Recalling the start of the process, Laura Price, the hotel manager, said, "We started to look into how green our business was when we installed our water treatment plant in 2006. Previously we had discharged our sewage into a treatment plant across the road but some years ago, without our knowledge, the pipe was diverted into a neighbouring field and was polluting the watercourse. The land happened to be owned by Prince Charles who reported it to the Environment Agency. As a result we installed a state of the art bio-disk system and this is working extremely well now".

The prestigious certification has been granted to the property after it successfully passed through a tough criteria in which it was assessed across a number of business areas, such as water issues, energy saving, recycling, purchasing, wildlife and landscape.

The Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS), a sustainable tourism certification scheme in the UK, has a membership of over 1,400 businesses.