How To Reduce Waste at Your Hospitality Business

In this piece I will offer some handy tips that any Hospitality business can take to start reducing their waste production, and what happens when you produce less waste? You save MONEY off your waste bill! 

Waste is one of the most colossal challenges of our times. Waste production continues to increase, Ireland is facing a potential waste mountain with no place to go, for some facts and stats continue reading to the end of this blog. 

What is one of the first but most important steps to start reducing waste at your hospitality business?

Check your bins

It's a simple task but certainly not one that people want to engage with. I myself have carried this task out during my time as green manager.

However one thing is for sure, I learned from it and I in carrying out this onerous task, we managed to reduce our waste by 30% in one year. 

Investigating your bins allows you to understand what waste is produced at your business, so you can then take the necessary action to reduce some of it or abolish some items completely. 

It is essential that you check your bins at different times of the day and different days of the week over the course of one week, so you can get a clear picture of what is in the bin at specific times of the day. To go a step further - use a little notebook and write down the items that you can see that are being disposed of the most. At the end of the week you can revise your results with your team and heads of department and identify the top two items that were being thrown away the most.

Involve your team 

For those running larger hospitality businesses, it is vital that you involve your team, especially your heads of department. Ask them to watch their departmental bins for a week before they are sent to the waste disposal area. Request that they also note the top two worst offenders appearing in their bins across all  departments (housekeeping, kitchen, leisure centre etc).

Gather all the information that your team has compiled at the end of the week with your own data and discuss together how you will tackle these waste issues and what possible action can be taken based on your results.

What are your top two most disposed of items? Are these items absolutely necessary to the daily operation of your business? Do you have them on site to make money or to enhance your customer experience? If the answer is no this question then the solution is easy - Abolish them from your business straight away!

Remember that when you are throwing something away - you paid for it to get it to your business, and now you are also paying for it to get it taken away by the waste collection company.

What if the item enhances your visitor experience? 

Change is never easy. And if you feel one of these items that is consistently appearing in your bins in fact enhances your visitor experience, the decision to abolish it can of course be hard. 

Let's think about it in a different way - how much does it enhance your visitor experience? Is it worth it when you calculate how much it is costing you to purchase the item and then get it taken away by your waste company on a weekly basis? Can you offer an alternative perhaps?

Here is a little story from a hotel I worked in a few years ago....

“After watching our landfill bin for a week, we clearly established that our top disposed item were slippers from the hotel bedrooms. They were offered complimentary in all of our guest rooms and this had been hotel policy for years. But after doing the maths, we decided to take a different approach. We took away the slippers from all bedrooms and we added a note from our General Manager to say the reason we had taken them away is because we were trying to apply Green practices and our first task was to reduce our landfill waste, however, if any guest wanted slippers, they could call reception and they would be brought up to their room. A month later, 2 customers had requested slippers to be sent to their room, and 12 other guests had commented how good our Green initiative was.” Result!! 

So, if you are concerned that your customers will not like the changes you need to implement, get them involved and give them a choice. Allow them to make the decision whether they want to create extra waste or not, and revise your results after a period of time. I guarantee you, that whatever the results, you will reduce your waste bill, your impact to the environment, and you will create good will amongst those of your customers that care for the environment.   

WASTE FACTS – Out of sight out of mind 

In 2016, up to 95% of Irish plastic waste was carried to China, in container ships, that had plenty of space for our rubbish after carrying consumer goods to Europe. But now, China has closed the doors to European Waste, and the problem has got real! In fairness, I always felt that sending waste to China was not a sustainable solution, how were they dealing with the waste? Were we aware if the waste was buried, incinerated or treated in some other manner? 

The term “Out of sight out of mind” comes to my head, and sending our waste away to a different country does not solve the problem, it only kicks it down the road, and soon, it will come back to bite us!  

The second problem we have in Ireland’s Waste is segregation, according to reports 30% of the waste found in our recycling bins is not recyclable, furthermore, landfill or food waste will contaminate our recycling bin and the entire disposal will become landfill.  

Waste facts according to Kim Bielenberg from Irish Independent:

1 million tonnes of packaging waste is generated in Ireland every year 

€700 - value of wasted food per person 

1 million tonnes of food is wasted 

61kg of plastic thrown out per person 

282,000 tonnes of plastic packaging produced per year 

160,000 tonnes of plastic incinerated as alternative fuel 

35% of plastic waste is recycled 

55% EU plastic recycling target (2030) 

88% of glass is recycled 

30% of green bin waste is in the wrong bin 

40,000 tonnes of waste tyres every year 

95% of Irish recyclable plastic went to China in 2016 

8 million tonnes of plastic dumped in the sea around the world per year 

Do you want to learn more about how you can manage and reduce different types of waste at your business? Check out our Green Manager programme - designed to upskill and prepare members of the Hospitality industry to become Sustainability Managers of the future, learning how to measure, manage and reduce the waste, energy and water of your business!

Or email us on [email protected]

Thank you for reading today!

 The Fifty Shades Greener Team 💚