Greening Your Hotel Stay With 4 Sustainable Steps

Staying at a hotel can be a luxurious experience – plush rooms with marshmallow-soft beds, lavish buffets to tuck into and every facility at your doorstep. But as comfortable as hotel rooms are, how green is your stay (I bet, not much)?

Photo credit: Frommer's

Hotels can generate a colossal amount of waste in order to offer their customers a happy experience – plastic bottles, plastic dessert containers, tonnes of newspapers food, bath essentials and more. While I get it that they need to do this in order to offer luxury and comfort (though there are green hotels that try to cut down their waste), we as customers, can do our bit to make our stay lean and green.

Here are a few simple sustainable steps each of us can take while staying at a hotel or resort:

1. Say No to bottled water and ask for a jug of RO water instead. Every hotel room is replenished with two to three bottles of water every single day. Multiply that with the number of rooms in a hotel and then the number of hotels in a city and you’ll get a mind-boggling figure. I like to carry a couple of steel bottles from home that I ask to be filled with purified water and also request a jug of water to be sent up to the room.

2. Read your news on your phone or in the lobby instead of accepting a newspaper every day. Every room gets a fresh newspaper in the mornings; however, when you’re at work in a city, not much of the newspaper gets read through. Also, the lobbies of hotels are stocked with different kinds of newspapers. So, when I want to consume the day’s news, I either go to the lobby or scroll through news websites.

3. Request the bed linen to be changed every few days instead of every day. This saves water and you’re still sleeping on a clean bed.

4. Load up your plate with only that amount of food that you will eat. When you’ve got a lavish spread to choose from, the tendency is to take a helping of a lot of items and then eat only the dishes that you really enjoy. But this leads to a lot of food wastage. Instead, survey the buffet counter and help yourself to dishes that you feel you’d like to eat.

With these 4 sustainable steps, we as individuals can leave a smaller carbon footprint while enjoying our hotel stay.

What sustainable steps do you take during your hotel stay?

Tell us what steps you're taking this summer by tweeting to us at @chandanawriter or shouting out at Lush Green Wellness (our online community of green peeps on Facebook). And hey, leave a comment below + Like our Facebook page.

Looking for more simple ways to reduce your carbon footprint? Here are 17 sustainable steps to green your daily lifestyle.

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