It is estimated that in its full capacity, a single four-star hotel with 200 rooms can use around 300,000 pieces of single-use plastic in just a month. To understand the scale of the problem we only need to multiply this number by 700,000 - a recent estimate of how many hotels and resorts there are worldwide. Yikes!

Even with the world now at a tipping-point when it comes to plastic waste, hotels are still using single-use amenities and even though they are recyclable containers, we pose the question, how much is actually being successfully recycled?

Shockingly, 91% of plastic waste isn’t recycled and 73% of beach litter is plastic (according to National Geographic) and when it comes to single use hotel amenities we can think of a few obvious reasons why this would be:

• Product left in containers ( on average only 15% off product in a single-use amenity bottle is used)
  
  
• The smaller size of the bottle, can mean that during the sorting process, containers can slip through the sorting fingers and end up in land-fill
  
  
• Labels or printed bottles can be problematic and not always made of recyclable materials that can be melted at the same temperatures as PET 1 or 2

So really, recyclable single-use hotel amenities aren’t an eco-friendly solution in our eyes, it’s a half-assed attempt with up to 95% of the plastic used in your hotel room ending up in landfill where they sit for hundreds of years, adding to the 20 million tonnes of garbage added to landfill in Australia alone. 

At this point, we’d heard enough… how could we not create a range of refillable bottles, sustainable sourced, natural products, stylish and secure wall bracket systems and plastic free solid hair and body bars to support hotels that are serious about reducing their environmental impact and meet the demands of more environmentally conscious travellers? 

To learn more about our natural and sustainable products for hotels and airbnb accommodation, visit aromabotanics.com.au