Do you own or run a Hospitality Business? And do you know how much money are you putting in the bin? 

There is a staggering statistic that 70% of the Food Waste produced by Hotels and Restaurants is actually avoidable. While we are putting food in the bin there are millions of people starving in other countries but for this piece we are going to move away from the human side of this problem, and look at it from an angle that motivates the majority of business owners: Cost Savings!

Stop throwing your money in the bin 

Putting food in the bin is quite literally the equivalent of putting your hard-earned cash in the bin. Of all waste types, this absolutely applies to food waste because of the many elements you have to factor in; 

1. You have purchased the raw produce at a cost. 
2. You have stored at your premises in fridges and freezers and therefore using energy that also costs you money.
3. You have then cooked it, using energy as well as staff wages to...

This is difficult to determine, because there is more than one issue at stake. 

In terms of Co2 emission at the production stage, Tetra Pak cartons are the winner, followed by plastic, then aluminium, and surprisingly then glass is the worst. 

Glass is the highest producer of carbon emissions because of what energy is required to produce it BUT if you are reusing the glass bottles, their shelf life is much greater than the other materials, and so it could be considered a more sustainable product. 

In terms of plastic pollution and the ability to do closed loop recycling, glass and aluminium are the winners. And as you recycle them more times, their carbon emissions start to fall back down towards cartons and plastic. 

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/guide-environmentally-friendly-drinks-packaging  

As per the above, it depends on how the item is going to be used and then disposed of. 

Some are better in terms of their carbon...

Back in 2012, while working as the Sales & Marketing Manager of Hotel Doolin in West Clare, my General Manager told me to form a "green team" and apply for Green Hospitality Ireland certification. 

Excuse me but...what?!

To say I was apprehensive at the start would be an absolute understatement! 

I had no idea where to even begin.

I attended workshops, seminars, and completed an endless number of courses as well as reading blogs about Green businesses. 

Within 2 years and with little to no investment, we managed to reduce our Energy by 30%, our Waste by 40% and our Water by 25%. 

My first thought was “WHY ISN’T EVERYONE DOING THIS?"

To me, greening your hotel or restaurant became not just “the nice thing” to do, it is instead “the smart” thing to do from a business perspective. 

My Light-bulb moment 

At this point of my career, everything shifted and changed for me forever.

The "Why...

In this piece I will offer some handy tips that any Hospitality business can take to start reducing their waste production, and what happens when you produce less waste? You save MONEY off your waste bill! 

Waste is one of the most colossal challenges of our times. Waste production continues to increase, Ireland is facing a potential waste mountain with no place to go, for some facts and stats continue reading to the end of this blog. 

What is one of the first but most important steps to start reducing waste at your hospitality business?

Check your bins.

It's a simple task but certainly not one that people want to engage with. I myself have carried this task out during my time as green manager.

However one thing is for sure, I learned from it and I in carrying out this onerous task, we managed to reduce our waste by 30% in one year. 

Investigating your bins allows you to understand what waste is produced at your business, so you can then take the necessary...

The linear economy or “take-make-use-waste” model is being exposed for its severe negative consequences environmentally. 

Society is realising that our systems are no longer serving us. On our current trajectory worldwide, waste generation will have increased by 70% by 2050 – that’s 3.4 billion metric tons! (Global waste generation - statistics & facts | Statista). 

The message of reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose and then recycle is slow to take real effect in counteracting this waste problem.  In the Hospitality industry we need to rethink: not what we offer but how we offer it –and the consequential waste from our decisions.  

The Hotel Yard 

One missed opportunity is when renovations are taking place at a Hospitality property.  Furniture, which is still perfectly useable is being thrown in the skip in large quantities. There is an alternative. Fifty Shades Greener has collaborated with Otolo, a global online...

Odran Lucey, executive chef at the Rose Hotel in Tralee, Ireland, has become the first person in the world to successfully complete a brand-new qualification for Environmental Sustainability Management in Hospitality.

Fifty Shades Greener (FSG) and the Confederation of Tourism & Hospitality (CTH) joined forces in late 2021 to create the first Level 4 (Level 6 in Ireland) certificate in environmental sustainability management in hospitality. This is the first qualification of its kind to be regulated as an official qualification on the Ofqual framework of education.

“Reducing carbon emissions should be something that becomes paramount in our daily routines if we really want to provoke a mind-set change. Environmental education is key to driving this transformation and the general education system has a responsibility to not only prepare learners for the world of work, but provide them with the skills to influence employers, politicians and the wider society. This can be...

When we think of luxury within hospitality, we think 5 star hotels and spas, Michelin star restaurants and extravagant comfort. Often, we don’t associate sustainability with this opulent experience.

However, incorporating practices into your operation that reduce the impact you are having environmentally and socially, does not mean an automatic compromise of the service that you provide your customers.

What does sustainable tourism look like to you? When defining this term, the UN World Tourism Organisation explains that it is:

“Tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities.”

A recent study from the accommodation platform giant AIRBNB and ‘think tank’ Economist Impact, on nearly 5,000 travelers from over 9 different countries, highlighted some revealing trends in relation to how people want to travel...

Food is necessary for human survival, yet, over the last few decades, the fast-paced society and world capitalist economies have slowly but surely made us lose our connection with the food we eat.

Producing food requires a huge environmental effort: land that has been deforested, species that have been driven to extinction, indigenous populations that have been made homeless, uprooted soil that has been degraded and a huge amount of water used.

The reality of the modern global food systems is that we produce way more food than we need to, 30% of it ends up in the bin before it even reaches our supermarkets, while millions of people in the world die of starvation.

It is clear that our food systems are broken and a total re-think of those systems needs to happen on a global scale, to create a system that is sustainable at all points of our food journey. From its production, processing, transportation and even disposal at the end of its food cycle.

Environmentally, one of the most...

Creating a any new culture in an organisation can feel daunting, particularly for industries recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

Professor Christina Edger from Birmingham City Business School highlighted 4 types of leadership from the Covid crisis: Deniers (angry, denied how the crisis affected their business), opportunists (used Covid-19 as an excuse for poor performance with other factors at play i.e. poor leadership), pragmatists (accepted different stages of the crisis, addressing issues speedily) and inspirers (able to see the bigger picture, care for their people as the crisis affected society as a whole).

The questions remain; how do we inspire our team, how do we encourage trust? How do we share our green values?

There are several leadership models and theories, but Brené Brown has highlighted 4 key skill sets every leader should possess and develop:

1. The ability to be vulnerable, to have the hard conversations.

2. Share one’s values clearly...

What can be more tempting than a sustainable solution that benefits your business in three ways - socially, economically and environmentally? 

You can triple win in your business by doing the following: 

1. Reducing your use of resources and CO2 footprint.
2. Reducing operating costs and empowering members of the team to take personal responsibility in the fight to reduce emissions. 
3. Use the approach ‘trust is built’, create a culture of transparency in communication, with customers and the community in which the business operates.

To triple win in your business it can be achieved through education of the team that this has the greatest impact: socially (training, upskilling, career progression, investing in your team and improved communication), economically (reductions and efficiency means cost savings) and environmentally (reduction in usage means less CO2 emissions): the triple win. 

This blog article will help your business embed a triple win...