How to Manage Hotel Waste: 5 Tips

The hotel industry is one of the business niches that generate the most waste around the world. It certainly makes sense from an operational point of view since guests tend to spend resources and hotels need to keep their spaces as clean as they can 24 hours a day, all week. While this was considered inconsequential in the past, the ongoing advancement of corporate green initiatives as well as the increasing development of sustainable technologies has made the matter unavoidable to the industry. Most of the measures taken by hotel management teams are primarily centered on the modification of certain habits of their employees.

To get a better understanding of how to effectively dispose waste in a hotel, you need to know some of these tips to save money on some resources.

1. Reshape Operational Habits

The day to day operation of your hotel is the testing ground where you’ll be able to manage how much waste your business produces. You can change small things to avoid creating more waste such as using refillable dispensers for cleaning products in every room.

Using china and dishware to serve meals instead of disposable plates, setting water filters on every floor instead of selling bottled water, avoid paper products outside of toilet paper on the bathrooms, and using LED lights instead of regular bulbs.

2. Classification and Quantification

In the past, hotels used to discard their waste in big dumpsters and they were done with it after it was taken away by their waste disposal service. These days hotels are encouraged to follow basic recycling principles. You can hire temporary assistance to help with the waste classification and quantification process, or you can train your cleaning personnel to dispose of every piece of waste on specific containers.

3. Manage Classification of Waste Properly

Out of the previous step, classification of waste is probably one of the most important steps in hotel waste management. The recycling principles are focused on the preventive measures, minimizing waste, reusing what is still usable, recovery of useful material and disposal of hotel waste.

Each step should be learned by all the employees of your hotel to enforce them as policy and avoid needless use of resources. The investment will prove to be sound and useful in the long run saving your operation a lot of money and wasted materials.

4. Re-learn Disposal Habits

In the past, waste disposal was handled by sending the generated waste to landfills either to be incinerated or compacted by garbage disposal companies. These days you can do your part of managing at least some part of the process on your end.

You can invest in food composters to manage the waste generated by leftover food. If your hotel generates too much solid wastes, you can get a compactor and make the hotel food waste disposal more cost-efficient by having your garbage collector come fewer times a week. The used cooking oil can be recycled into biodiesel, animal feed and many other beneficial products. You can also install a composting plant to make compost from organic waste generated in your hotel.

5. Make Waste Disposal Profitable

Not many hotel managers know about this, but they can turn a profit by selling their generated waste in they follow the basic rules to recycle certain types of material such as plastic containers, paper, or cardboard.

By contacting local companies that use these types of waste to work with you can solve part of the problem. If you manage to make it a sustainable model, the training offered to your employees to manage waste will pay off even quicker than you expect.

Conclusion

Waste disposal has become an opportunity rather than a nuance for the hotel industry. If you put your mind to it and work out the logistics to make it happen, you will be able to get some profit out of it.