Sustainability

Wood is ingenious! Because wood grows, grows back and replaces finite raw materials.
Our conclusion: use wood - protect the climate!

As enthusiastic foresters, we as a family have attached great importance to wood as a raw material for generations. Long before the Glöcknerin was built, forestry was the most important source of income for several generations of our family. We have a very close relationship with our forest and the raw material wood. This is also reflected in the design and construction of the Hotel Glöcknerin, be it in the exposed roof trusses, the solid wood buildings, the furniture or the heating energy.

Since 2008, we have set ourselves the goal of constructing all buildings in solid wood wherever technically and officially possible.

Why are we doing this? Wood is a natural, renewable building material. We love the living environment that timber construction creates. We enjoy the incredible quality of living that creates a special warmth in the room. Timber construction is the new high-tech construction. New production techniques in timber construction open up unimagined possibilities. In addition, timber construction is quick and fast, which is good for us so that we can have our buildings ready for the next season within 6 months. Timber construction also ensures that everything is ready for you at the start of the season.

Building with wood is an important contribution to saving CO2. This is because a "second forest" is created in the hotel, so to speak. Wood stores CO2 in the same way that trees do. A small example to illustrate this: A 6-storey residential building made of wood produces 93 percent less CO2 than its twin made of mineral building materials.

1 m³ of wood stores 1,000 kg of CO2

Over 50% of our bed capacity at the Hotel Glöcknerin is already built in solid wood - with the aim that all our guests will be able to experience the living climate of wood in the future. Our staff are already enjoying this - because our staff residence is built entirely from solid wood.

Over 2000 m³ of wood is used in our hotel, which saves 2,000,000 kg of CO2!

In addition, timber construction is also returned to the circular economy at the end of its useful life. This means that individual parts can be reused for other timber construction purposes. If no further use is possible, wood can still be used to generate energy. Only as much CO2 is released as was bound in the natural process of photosynthesis. This reduces our CO2 footprint by more than half.

It always starts with an idea and a vision. That's why we built our first biomass heating system back in 1993, as a heating system on our farm. The Hargassner system at the time was serial number 5, and we can proudly report that we have always been innovative and ahead of the times in this field.

Encouraged by this experience, we immediately opted for biomass in the first part of the Glöcknerin building in 1997. Due to the expansion of the hotel, the system became too small and was renewed in 2002. Together with our neighboring hotel, a new plant with a heat output of 680 kW was built, which could have been used to heat 50 single-family homes in an environmentally friendly way.

But we had not yet reached the end of our development in the field of biomass. After a few conversions and extensions, this plant was also too small again. In 2012, we decided to build a large-scale plant. Today's combined heat and power plant has an impressive output of 1,200 kW and now supplies 3 hotels. State-of-the-art technology ensures the most efficient output - electrostatic precipitators ensure clean smoke from the chimney.

Approx. 3000 m³ of wood chips are burned in the course of a winter season. This produces approx. 1,900,000 kW of heat.

Is that even possible in a hotel? Yes! It is possible. If you really want to save electricity, you have to think about where there is real potential for saving electricity.

We got to the bottom of this. Most people know that our power sockets supply 230 V electricity, but very few people know that most electrical appliances also run on 210 V.

How do you go from 230 V to 210 V? With a voltage regulator. We throttle the flowing electricity and thus save 8.7 % of electricity. That's a lot!

Our drinking water of the highest quality springs not far from the Glöcknerin on our alpine pastures. This water comes from mountain springs at 1700 m above sea level and is not drawn from the groundwater table. Inexhaustible and sustainable, it bubbles up from the ground and provides our guests with drinking water of a quality that most people don't have at home. Nobody needs to lug plastic bottles of water to their apartment.
From the very beginning of our hotel history, it was clear to us that we would set up our own water supply. With the background knowledge of the high quality of our drinking water. It was important to us that the water did not have to be pumped through long pipes.

Revitalized water according to Grander

"Water is a living system and as such it also has the ability to regenerate. The basic idea behind Johann Grander's process is to improve the water structure - this strengthens the water's self-purification and resistance and creates stability in the water."

The water revitalized by GRANDER® is characterized by the following properties, among others:

Fine taste (and thus increased drinking desire)
Long shelf life
Pleasant, soft sensation for skin and hair when bathing and showering
Noticeable freshness, more intense taste and long shelf life of food
Improved plant growth and eye-catching flowers
Savings on detergents and cleaning agents
Clean heating water protects the heating system
Animals instinctively prefer it
The water returns to the natural water cycle regenerated and strengthened

We live in a cultural landscape that has been shaped by man. As farmers and foresters, we have paid great attention to the care of our land for generations. We look after meadows and fields in the valley, alpine pastures here in Obertauern and, of course, our forest.

Tourism and nature are not mutually exclusive. We are tourism experts, we create offers and opportunities so that our guests can enjoy nature. In our local cultural landscape, we actively shape nature to make it discoverable for those seeking recreation. Nature and our landscape are our most important assets and form the basis of tourism in our region.

We maintain areas so that they remain as they are. We plant vegetation so that everything is as close to nature as possible. We restore areas that are used for tourism purposes so that they retain their natural appearance. Plant and species diversity is very important to us. And we do all this because we have always done it this way. Agricultural know-how that you can't learn at a desk, but from your father, who learned it from his father and his father's father. That is active nature conservation.

Forests in Austria are the No. 1 climate protection factor and the CO2 reservoir par excellence.
Around 3.6 billion tons of CO2 are stored in Austrian forests. That is more than 40 times Austria's annual CO2 emissions.

Our family has been managing approx. 220 hectares of subalpine spruce forest and larch forest for generations. Maintaining these areas on extremely steep slopes requires a great deal of skill and knowledge. This is because the forest here largely serves as a protective forest and - recently relevant in times of climate awareness - also as a huge CO2 store, whereby the commercial forest, in which trees are removed and replanted, has been proven to store the most CO2.

In simple terms, every tree stores CO2, but the growth of a tree slows down over time. In commercial forests, the mature tree is removed and the CO2 remains stored in the wood for further use. Active forest management therefore stores CO2.

As the Huber family, we therefore practice "active CO2 storage" by managing our forest. We plant at least 1,500 new trees every year. In addition, we ensure suitable natural regeneration of the forest. Through these two measures, the forest grows - it grows and grows.

On average, 1 hectare of forest stores around 6 tons of CO2 per year. The maintenance of our forests ensures an annual storage of 1320 tons of CO2. That's quite a lot!

We manage our forest sustainably, which means that we do not remove more wood than grows back each year. This leaves a further 700 tons of stored CO2 for long-term use in wood products.

Sustainability in the forest also means ensuring biodiversity and creating a healthy habitat for the wild animals that live there. We have been actively working to increase tree diversity in our reforestation projects for decades.

Our favorite hobby is hunting, preserving and caring for our game. But hunting is not just about killing animals. Hunting is much more, it is the ethical and moral responsibility and respect for the animals that live in our forest.

The hunting area we look after covers a total area of around 930 hectares. In addition to the large cloven-hoofed animals red deer, roe deer and chamois, a number of other animals also live here. In hunting terms, these are feathered game such as capercaillie, black grouse, hazel, etc., predatory game such as foxes, badgers, martens, weasels, etc. but also our little mountain dwellers - the marmots.

Those who love their game also look after it and ensure that there is always a healthy and constant population of game and that hunting is therefore sustainable.

When we talk about wildlife management, this means that we also have to manage our game in order to do justice to the various interest groups (hunting, forestry, recreational use). This requires a lot of time, work, diligence, understanding and money.