Waste
Global waste production has increased by 50% in 20 years. Landfills and recycling centers are increasingly saturated. To reduce the impact of its activities, Accor gives priority to products that use less packaging and are less toxic for the environment at the end of their life cycle.
Only 10% of waste products are recycled in the world. The possibilities for progress are substantial. Accor is experimenting different processes in its facilities to recover more waste and increase the recycling segments.
Accor 2010 objectives
1 - Recycling paper, cardboard and glass in 70% of owned and leased hotels.
2009 year-end indicator: 51% of owned and leased hotels recycle paper, cardboard and glass.
2 - Processing batteries and compact fluorescent light bulbs/tubes in 95% of owned and leased hotels.
2009 year-end indicator: 86% of owned and leased hotels process batteries and compact fluorescent light bulbs/tubes.
Achievements
The management and progress tools
- Accor Hotels Environment Charter: through its Hotels Environment Charter, Accor recommends 15 measures to dispose and recycle waste.
- OPEN (Outil de Pilotage Environnemental): OPEN is Accor's environmental management and reporting tool. At the end of 2009, a new dedicated waste management module was launched to enable hotel managers to monitor the amount of waste produced per room, as well as the recovery rate and the cost of waste disposal.
The hotels best practices
- Partnerships: in France in 2009, Etap Hotel and hotelF1 worked with Screlec, a non-profit environmental organization that collects and recycles used batteries. In the United States, Motel 6 and Studio 6 have joined the National Partnership for Environmental Priorities to improve their efforts to recycle compact fluorescent light bulbs and alkaline batteries.
- Strengthened relations with collection service providers in France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium since 2009 to facilitate the monitoring and measurement of actual waste produced.
- In Brazilian hotels and several African countries, glass, plastic and metal packaging is considered to be a real secondary recoverable material. These containers are carefully sorted to be resold and reused.
- Pullman Paris Rive Gauche, France (2009): the hotel has established a "performance agreement" on waste production with a service provider. The objective is to reduce the volume of waste and to innovate in selective sorting, while controlling waste management costs.
- Ibis France: between 2006 and 2008, Ibis hotels in France set up a program to reduce the volume of non recycled waste products by 10%.