Starwood Hotels & Resorts Strives To Be More Sustainable

It takes much energy and water to maintain hotels, and guests who stay at them generate much waste. A hotel chain that wants to be more sustainable must make reductions in all three areas. Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which has 1,200 hotels worldwide, has managed to achieve reductions in energy and water use and waste. Starwood has reduced its global energy consumption by by over 11.5 percent since 2008, enough energy to power over 22,000 home for one year. Water use intensity has decreased by 14.8 percent since 2008, enough water to fill 49 million bathtubs and almost 75 percent of the way toward its goal.   Starwood Hotels & Resorts published its first ever global citizenship report on Earth Day, April 22, 2014. The report details the company’s sustainability initiatives, including measures to reduce waste generated by guests. In 2012, Starwood began requiring bathroom amenities across its properties to be 100 percent biodegradable and bottled in 100 percent recyclable plastic. Its Aloft, Element and Four Points brands provide shampoo, conditioner and shower gel in dispensers in guest bathrooms instead of the single use take-home variety. All three brands also replaced paper towels with hand dryers in public restrooms. Through Starwood’s program, Make a Green Choice, approximately 153 million gallons of water through 2012 have been saved. Starwood’s hotels saved 160,000 reams of paper and over 9,000 trees through the E-Folio checkout program in the first 16 months.    To continue reading, click here   Image Credit: Chris   Gina-Marie Cheeseman is a Central California based journalist who writes about sustainability, environmental issues, and healthy living. Armed with a degree in journalism and a passion for social responsibility, she writes for a number of online publications. She firmly believes that collaboration between the public and private sectors can help solve many problems facing the planet and its people. She has been named one of the 75 Environmentalists to Follow on Twitter by Mashable.com.