Hotel chains from Hilton to Marriott have cut back on once-ubiquitous small plastic bottles of shampoo and other bathroom staples, and they’re working to further reduce their reliance on plastic that gets discarded after one use following pressure from environmentally conscious shareholders and new state laws.

Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. required all of its hotels to offer full-size shampoo and soap containers in rooms starting last year, and now offers a digital key card option. And after a shareholder proposal from Green Century Capital Management, the company also agreed in April to release a single-use plastics report by 2025 and to set a plastics reduction goal by 2026.

Marriott International Inc. agreed with Green Century in March to set a single-use plastic reduction goal by the end of 2025 and to disclose a baseline footprint of single-use plastics starting in 2026. Marriott said in its environmental, social, and governance report that it is piloting an initiative to replace single-use plastic soap containers with more sustainable alternatives, and to remove plastic packaging from soap bars.

Hotels will need to make further changes in the coming years as activist concerns and additional laws and regulations addressing single-use plastic pollution pile up. A New York state law taking effect next year will ban hotels from providing guests with toiletries in single-use plastic bottles. The 2021 law was originally poised to begin last year, but was reportedly delayed to give hotels more time to use their remaining stock. A similar law in California took effect in 2023, while Illinois is following suit with legislation signed into law just last week. The Illinois law will take effect next July.

The Biden administration is taking action also beyond the hospitality industry: last month it committed to cutting out single-use plastics across the federal government to reduce pollution.

Annie Sanders, Green Century’s director of shareholder advocacy, said that urging hotel chains and other industries to examine their packaging including single-use guest amenities was “a key area of concern.”

“It’s something that everyone can relate to, it’s very visible by your average person,” Sanders said. “And it just seems wasteful. Most people can agree you don’t need those tiny little bottles.”

But there’s still a long way to go for businesses, including hotels, said Judith Enck, a professor at Bennington College who focuses on plastics and was a regional administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration.

“Only a handful of states have adopted the very basic law that gets rid of small plastic shampoo containers,” she said. “We need that to be adopted nationally.”

Calls for Change

Plastic consumption doubled from 2000 to 2019, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and only 9% of plastic waste is actually recycled. The rest is often littered, incinerated, dumped in a landfill, left in an uncontrolled dumpsite, or ends up in the ocean.

Hotel guests are likely to applaud changes that would reduce such pollution: a study published last year—conducted by market research company Ipsos on the behalf of ocean conservation non-profit Oceana—said there’s bipartisan support for national and local policies that would cut single-use plastics.

Green Century also spurred action at Choice Hotels International Inc. following a shareholder proposal. Choice Hotels said in February that it would conduct a plastics reduction inventory program this year to ultimately set a new target to reduce single-use plastics.

Choice Hotels’ goal for 2025 is to make bulk amenities standard across most domestic brands, it said in its ESG report.

While it seems like the hotel industry is moving in the right direction, commitments to reduce single-use plastics are just the first step, said Melissa Valliant, communications director at Beyond Plastics—a Bennington College environmental activism effort led by Enck.

“We really want to hold those companies accountable and make sure that they stick to their promises,” Valliant said. There are some very easy solutions for all hotels to incorporate, she said, including leaving reusable glass bottles in rooms instead of single-use plastic bottles, setting up water refill stations, and eschewing unnecessary plastic wrappers on cups and even remote controls.

Challenges Ahead

Hotels have encountered some difficulties as they move away from single-use plastics, according to the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, which includes Hilton and Choice Hotels. They are navigating a maze of regulations across regions, the alliance said, and there aren’t industry-wide standards for what makes packaging “sustainable.”

The alliance said there’s more that can be done. “We ask that hotels go beyond their own operations and engage their supply chain in sustainability efforts,” the group said in a statement. Suppliers could reduce single-use plastic in food deliveries, for example.

Companies across industries would be wise to speed up their plastic reduction sooner rather than later, particularly as further regulation is poised to ramp up in the next several years, said Angeli Patel, executive director at the Berkeley Center for Law and Business.Regulations have moved far quicker outside of the US: Europe approved a ban on single-use plastics in 2019 that targets plastic cutlery, straw, polystyrene cups and more.

“If you’re smart, you’re going to get ahead of it and you’re going to innovate,” Patel said. “It’s in the best interest of most companies to be ambitious today.”

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