The Impact of Hotel Waste and the EcoCents Program

In the hotel and hospitality industry, one of the most important things is that your guests be comfortable. Comfortable in their bedding, on their chairs, in their bathroom, and so on. The bathroom can be a particularly tricky area, because not only are you dealing with the cleanliness of the room itself in terms of pleasing your guest, but also with how they clean themselves. There was a time when single-use, plastic wrapped products were what customers wanted to see and felt comfortable with. That time is quickly passing us by.

At Green Suites Hotel Solutions, we provide hotel products and programs that help our clients become cleaner and greener for their guests. From B&B’s to five-star, hundred room hotels, we have hotel amenities and hotel amenity programs that help motels and hotels keep both costs and waste low. One of our greatest programs is the EcoCents Dispenser Program, a program with no capital costs that helps our clients use only the amount of soap, shampoo, and other products that they need and that will signal to guests that they’re staying with a mindful member of the hotel, lodging, and hospitality industry.

How Hotel Amenity Waste Affects the Planet

At Green Suites, we’ve been providing guests with cleaner and greener hotel amenity options for the last 27 years through our EcoCents program, and now, with a wide range of attractive dispensers, some of the best amenity brands in the industry and a world that is increasingly approving of reusable amenity dispensers and disapproving of plastic bottles, we stand ready as the best option for companies ready to make the switch. More and more, it’s becoming a necessity, with states like California already applying penalties for the use of single-use plastic wrapped amenities because of the environmental destruction they bring.

While it’s hard to pin down how much waste there is in the hotel industry, we can be certain that it’s significant. It can be seen in the early actions that some companies have taken, and how much of an impact their single action should have. The Marriott, the parent-company of a slew of hotel chains, expects that 1,500 hotels in North America will have made the change to in-shower dispensers, and that this will save approximately 35 million bottles and 375,000 pounds of plastic. Assuming that’s a fairly representative sample of the industry, and with close to 80,000 hotels and motels in the U.S., that could mean that close to 20 million pounds of plastic trash, 10,000 tons, could be eliminated from the U.S. lodging industry just from eliminating plastic bottles.

With more than 8 million tons of plastic dumped into our ocean each year, that’s just a drop in the bucket, but if all hotels, motels, and other lodging providers made the switch, it could have a major impact on the world’s overall pollution levels. The U.K. has reported about 290,000 metric tonnes of waste from its hotels alone each year, or about 320,000 tons in the imperial (U.S.) system of measurement. Much of that is plastic. The U.K. contains about 45,000 of the world’s roughly 700,000 hotels, or roughly 6.5%. If we assume the rest of the world’s hotel’s produced waste at a similar rate to the U.K., that’s around 5 million tons of trash from hotels alone. While we can only imagine the overall impact they have, we can safely assume the plastic bottles from hotel amenities make up hundreds of thousands of tons of the plastic that is wasted around the world each year.

How EcoCents Can Help

With EcoCents, you get a program that has been built and perfected to make your plastic and amenity cost waste a thing of the past. Our soap, shampoo, and other amenity dispensers that are made for both in-shower and over the sink use, come in a variety of fashionable generic and branded designs. Partnering with some of the best hotel amenity brands, such as PAYA, DANI, and Paul Mitchell, and allowing you to only pay for the amount that you need, it’s no wonder that we’ve been a trusted provider of hotel amenities to lodging establishments around the world for more than two decades. 

With the EcoCents program, we typically deliver a 30 to 70% reduction in amenity costs, and around 90% reduction in waste related to the amenities we provide. Not only does this bring the plastic you’re wasting down nearly as much as possible, but it also saves you money in reduced labor, soap, shampoo, and other amenity costs. Simply pick out your desired dispensers and your amenity types and brands, and then we will determine your price-per-occupied room based on those factors, your property size and typical occupancy, as well as the length of our pending agreement.

It’s really as simple as that to get started towards sustainable hotel amenity practices, reduced waste, and reduced costs.

Get Started With EcoCents and Green Suites Today

If you think about what you’re already paying, and how much EcoCents could save you in the long run, then the cost of becoming a member of the EcoCents Dispenser Program is really just the time it’s going to take for you to contact us and set it up! Our friendly Green Suites Hotel Solutions staff is standing by to fill you in on all the details and there’s no capital costs to get started, so there’s no reason to wait on getting cheaper, environmentally friendly hotel amenities and products through the EcoCents Dispenser Program.