Sustainability
Sustainability
Not a waste
Dan Cave speaks to Philip Greer, GM at Cambridge’s University Arms, part of Marriott Bonvoy, and Joanna Kurowska, VP & MD at IHG Hotels & Resorts, UK and Ireland, about
how hotels are tackling the growing challenge of waste – from food and plastics to energy and water – while maintaining the luxury experience guests expect.
mmaculate room service. Marble bathrooms. Top-end spas. Champagne afternoon teas. At its upper echelons, the hotel industry has long been associated with opulent luxury. Splendour that was worth, for said luxury end, $109.8bn in 2023 according to Research and Markets data; part of a wider $1.5trn hotel industry by Statista figures from the same period. It’s hardly surprising that an industry worth so much is resource-hungry. Keeping pillows plumped and laundered, as well as surfaces gleaming, is backed by a flurry of activities that come at high waste and carbon cost. In 2022, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation found that the hotel industry contributed 3% of global carbon emissions, both in building the hotels themselves and keeping them operational. Elsewhere, a multitude of academic studies from the past decade found that hotels generate large amounts
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of food and plastic waste: a 200-room hotel is estimated to use 300,000 bits of plastic each month, according to
businesswaste.co.uk. They also have exceptionally high levels of water usage (from laundry services to spa pools) and have energy levels higher than comparable commercial buildings. Indeed, greenhouse gas emissions are higher for hotels than for any other comparably sized building other than hospitals. With the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs finding that stays in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar produce the most carbon per hotel room.
The green shoots of green regulation Pressure on hoteliers to become more sustainable is growing. Many governments (Spain, Germany and France among them) now have legally binding net- zero targets that have informed a growing lattice of
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