The company that runs the Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotel chains announced this week that all of its 843,000 guest rooms will provide shampoo and other bathroom amenities from bulk-sized containers, eliminating millions of plastic bottles from landfills.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the world’s leading hotel companies, will be implementing the phase-out across all 5,600 of their properties worldwide with the transition to be completed within two years.
Building on its efforts to reduce plastic waste as part of a broader sustainability agenda, this pledge makes IHG the first global hotel company to commit all brands to removing bathroom miniatures in favor of bulk-size amenities.
Almost a third of its hotels have already adopted the change, according to Keith Barr, the CEO of IHG.
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“It’s more important than ever that companies challenge themselves to operate responsibly—we know it’s what our guests, owners, colleagues, investors, and suppliers rightly expect,” said Barr. “Switching to larger-size amenities will allow us to significantly reduce our waste footprint and environmental impact as we make the change.”
IHG currently has an average of 200 million bathroom miniatures in use across its entire hotel estate every year. As the new brand standard is adopted between now and 2021, the company expects to see a significant reduction in plastic waste.
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Switching to bulk-size amenities is a tested approach at IHG, which believes their hotel guests increasingly want more sustainability without any impact on the quality of their experience.
In October 2018, IHG announced the removal of single-use plastic straws from its hotels globally—an average of 50 million straws removed from IHG’s hotel estate each year, enough to stretch all the way from New York to Tokyo.
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