By DAVID POGUE //
If I were really an “Eco Dude” — if I wanted the smallest carbon footprint humanly possible, I’d never get in a car. I’d own nothing that’s been manufactured or transported. I’d never heat or cool the house. I’d do without electricity. I’d grow my own food. I wouldn’t have had kids. I wouldn’t be me at all.
The challenge, therefore, is curbing my carbon production without becoming a mountaintop monk.
In most areas, I’m doing pretty well. But my job as a TV correspondent involves travel, and travel is a toughie. Ain’t no such thing as an electric Boeing 737. (Although, honestly, electric planes are coming along nicely. Current prototypes can go 300 miles on a charge, carrying six people — and battery tech is improving about 10% a year. We’ll get there.)
For now, I assuage my guilt by tapping Delta’s “Buy carbon offsets for this flight” checkbox. Doing so adds, say, $8 to the cost of the ticket; that money, in principle, funds some project somewhere that counteracts my share of the flight by planting trees or protecting a forest. Sometimes, though, I encounter an industry that seems determined to resist my efforts. For example, hotels.
Hampton Inns are part of Hilton. When I checked in to one recently, they handed me my room card, Wi-Fi instructions — and two plastic bottles of water. In a plastic bag.
They didn’t ask. They handed.
Let’s see now. Hilton manages about 1.2 million hotel rooms. They’re not all full every night, and not all of them force the plastic down your throat. But OK. Let’s say that 40% of those rooms trigger the bottle-shoving. That’s 960,000 plastic bottles that Hilton alone is churning out every single night. About 11 tons of plastic that will wind up in the landfill, the oceans, and your veins.
(“But they’ll be recycled!” Oh, please. No, they won’t.)
Now, let’s suppose that Hilton executives do not, in fact, live in some pre-internet cave, and that they are aware of the plastics problem. Clearly, someone must have crunched the numbers and calculated that the purchase price of those bottles — and the environmental cost — pays off. Maybe there was a customer survey and people said they like the free waters. Maybe the little gift generates customer loyalty and return bookings. Well, you know what those customers would probably like better? A nice, free sports bottle. A reusable bottle.
So, here’s my proposal to those hotels: Invite your guests to grab a free, shiny, new aluminum sports bottle at check-in (offer, don’t insist). Point your patrons to a clean, shiny water dispenser in the lobby (maybe infused with mint or lemon) for filling it. Do a customer survey on that deal, Hilton!
And crunch that spreadsheet, too. The price for plastic sports bottles in bulk is 92 cents each; for sleek aluminum ones, it’s $2.20.
OK, that’s more expensive than the two plastic bottles you’re giving out (about 50 cents wholesale), but how’s this to cheer you up? You can put your logo on that bottle. Free advertising forever! And what price can you put on the warm, grateful feeling a free gift will inspire in every guest?
I’ve got something to say about the mini fridges, too. They’re in 60% of hotel rooms now, costing each hotel about $215 a year in electricity per room and producing 275 pounds of carbon dioxide. Per room. That comes to 144 more tons of carbon blanketing the planet, for the mere 20 percent of hotel guests who even care about a mini fridge.
I once tweeted about hotel mini fridges. My followers’ arguments for their continued existence seemed to be (a) “But I take a medicine that has to be refrigerated,” (b) “But I need to put breast milk in there” and (c) “But I put leftovers in there.”
Got some bad news for you, folks. The mini fridges don’t get cold enough for any of that. They hang out at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which the government calls “the danger zone” for leftovers. Food and Wine cautions you especially about putting seafood in there. If you need a real fridge, the front desk will happily chill your stuff.
That’s why I turn off every fridge in every hotel room I occupy, and I encourage you to do the same. The hotel is providing the temp knob on that fridge, isn’t it? It’s my right to adjust it — no different than a thermostat. I’m no eco-terrorist.
If the next guest needs the fridge, they’re welcome to turn it on again—but 17 million empty mini fridges running 24/7 365 days a year is not what the world needs right now.
And speaking of air-freezing systems, in what universe is 62 degrees a good default temperature? That was, in fact, the temp of the Florida room I checked into recently. I may be a liberal snowflake, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep me frozen.
Hotels are the dirtiest chunk of the transportation industry, At their current growth rate, by 2050 they’ll be pumping out 131% more carbon pollution than they do now. (Especially, by the way, if they keep putting plastic disposable cups in the bathroom wrapped in plastic.)
Not all hotels, to be fair, are villainous. I’m happy to report that our own Bedford Post Inn does not have mini fridges and does not hand out plastic in any form. No mini soaps, no disposable shampoo bottles and, in the bathrooms, they give you glasses made of glass.
But they can’t all be Bedford hotels. Remember that Hampton Inn that gives out the two plastic bottles? They literally have a card hanging in the bathroom that says: “We intend to pave the way to a net-zero future.” And sure enough, a PR rep let me know that by 2023, Hilton hotels eliminated (well, were supposed to eliminate) single-use miniature soap and shampoo bottles. And 70% of its hotels offer water-bottle filling stations.
But what about those water bottles in a plastic bag, handed over to every guest? “Efforts vary by brand and property,” the rep said.
David Pogue is an Emmy-winning correspondent for “CBS Sunday Morning” and a New York Times bestselling author. He lives around here.