At Marriott International, we have a responsibility and vested interest in helping to address some of the world’s most pressing social, environmental, and economic issues. With our size and global scale, we are well positioned to be part of the solution. From hotel design to the guest experience, sustainability is embedded into our business strategy. Our sustainability strategy is driven by a wide range of initiatives that have been fostered throughout our history of putting people first, giving back to communities, and operating more responsibly to Serve Our World. This includes efforts such as creating resource-efficient hotels, purchasing sustainable products, and supporting innovative environmental initiatives.
Our sustainability efforts have a very 360 degree approach and our endeavor is to integrate them in our entire hotel operations. So, across the board and various disciplines, these are some things that we have initiated and are in the process for the near future. To summarize, a big part of our sustainability efforts lie in carbon footprint, in terms of heat, light and power.
HEAT, LIGHT, POWER AND WATER
There are a couple of things we have put in place that have a positive impact to the environment. As a hotel, we are committed to using clean energy, we buy wind power – there is a 30% to 40% percentage of energy that we utilize at the hotel and comes from wind energy. This has been fairly successful for the hotel. We are also fortunate to have access to four bore wells that are in our premises so that we are able to maximize utilization of that water. We also have an in-built RO osmosis plant, so the water we do utilize goes for an entire filtration process and that is further utilized in the hotel premises in the form of the WC, for gardening purposes and any other place where we can repurpose it efficiently.
Solar power is also a big endeavor for us, today, all our periphery lights are solar powered, so they get energy during the day and power up in the evenings post sunset. As a hotel, we are also in the process of installing solar panels on the terrace of the hotel. We stay very positive and our endeavor is to initiate this by the end of this calendar year, where we will be sonal enabled as well. We do believe that with the solar and wind energy that we will get, we are in the process of ensuring that all our needs are contained much within our premises and similarly with our water requirements where we minimize water from outside as much as possible i.e. in the form of water tankers etc.
In addition to this, we are looking to bring more savings by discontinuing very high consumption boilers, we are now replacing them with heat pumps that make us that much more efficient and we utilize that much less energy which is also very important to us.
GUEST ROOMS
With respect to our guest rooms, we have eliminated any kind of single use plastic i.e. toothbrush, combs etc. and we are in the process of transitioning in to residential style amenities, so we will soon be eliminating the single-use amenities. This has already been identified and we stay optimistic that as we enter Q4, we will see a complete transition in our guest rooms.
FOOD AND BEVERAGE
Our food and beverage space is also very important for us from a sustainable stand point and we are proud of responsible sourcing considering our size and scale of food and beverage operations. We source a lot of produce and are very cognizant of the partners we work with and the produce we source. Marriott International as an organization has clearly defined what engendered species are by market and globally what cannot be procured and we stand true to that. In addition, food wastage is a priority for us at the hotel. We are very mindful and have a process in place to monitor food wastage on a daily basis. We work closely and collaboratively with various departments to see how we can mitigate that. We also have an organic waste converter in the hotel that converts all this waste to manure and we are fortunate to have a fairly large garden/ landscape area where we can reutilize this.
We are committed to educating our teams internally and we go with “no bins” where we do not place any bins in our associate dining room, this as a result helps instill a culture where there is minimal wastage and the sort of consciousness in the system.
OTHER INITIATIVES
The other initiatives include minimal use of plastic, case in point, utilizing more glass bottles across hotel operations and minimizing the use of plastic and even where we are using plastic, we are working with a partner that has a more sustainable plastic option.
