Hotels that provide single-serve plastic bottles for drinking water and small plastic containers for toiletries always get minus points when it comes to environmental and social concern ratings in Life's hotel review column "Been There/Done That". The bottles are not environmentally friendly.
Some hotel owners and managers respond to the criticism regarding the use of plastic (known as polyethylene terephthalate — PET) bottles, saying that they collect the bottles for recycling. Others added that plastic bottles are for guest safety, as glass bottles can be broken.
If the guest safety reason is to be believed, I wonder why drinking glasses and porcelain coffee mugs and dishes are also available in guest rooms, as they can also be broken.
I decided to consult with expert Dr Chirapol Sintunawa, vice-president and secretary-general of the Green Leaf Foundation, which was founded in 1998 to promote knowledge and assist owners and operators in the tourism industry to develop environmental friendly and sustainable tourism practices.
"Chances that glass bottles will be broken and injure guests are really low," he said.
The main reason always comes down to the word "convenience", he added.
As plastic bottles are much lighter than glass, they can be shipped in larger lots to hotels. It is also easier for hotels to keep them in a stockroom and distribute them to guest rooms.
But convenience comes with a price. And it is paid with the impact to our environment.
Those drinking water plastic bottles are a single-use disposable item, meaning they become waste right after the water is finished.
It takes more than 450 years for a plastic bottle to decompose. Suppose two plastic bottles of drinking water are emptied each day in one guest room (out of 100 rooms in one hotel). That comes to 200 plastic bottles a day, or 73,000 a year. Imagine how many hotels and resorts serve plastic bottles in guest rooms and also in their restaurants. We may have millions of plastic bottles to manage each year.
And who pays for the recycling process? Not the manufacturers that produce the bottled water, nor the hotels who distribute them to guests. Not even the customers who drink it.
"Only 30% of those empty drinking water plastic bottles are recycled," said Chirapol.
The rest are scattered around on the beach, in the sea, sewage systems, canals or mixed with other rubbish and contaminated.
"PET bottles normally cannot be reused as bottles for drinking water, because it is not safe for our health," he said.
The plastic bottles that are recycled generally lose quality, meaning they have to be downgraded and turned into other products such as bottles for shampoo.
Glass bottles, however, are 100% reusable. They can also be recycled again and again without a loss in quality.
What's more, producing a plastic bottle of water requires a certain amount of oil. National Geographic's website states the following: "Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle."
One litre of oil can fuel our car to run for about 12km.
Imagine the amount of oil we use for producing bottled water. It is believed that, globally, we consume about 190 billion litres of water each year. The oil that is used for producing plastic bottles could be useful for fuelling millions of vehicles a year.
Hotel owners and management teams should have think twice before setting a budget for buying drinking water for guests. They should be responsible for their actions.
Chirapol suggests that hotels with more than 200 rooms need to implement a drinking water filtration system and serve water in glass bottles. The reuse of those bottles can help save on operational costs in the long run.
Showing environmental concern and social responsibility is not only about donating money to schools, planting mangrove forests or conducting charity projects. It can be as simple as not using plastic drinking water bottles or plastic bottles for toiletries.
Karnjana Karnjanatawe is a travel writer for the Life section of the Bangkok Post.