Some Talk About Toilet Paper

by Glenn Hasek September 22, 2008 14:16
I had the pleasure of chatting with Diana Beltran today. She is the Environmental Development Manager at the Grand Hyatt New York, a property with 1,311 rooms. Diana told me that the hotel used to throw away unused rolls of toilet paper. (It is the hotel's policy to provide each guest with a full, new roll.) The tossed paper amounted to 65 pounds a week—3,380 pounds a year. That is the equivalent of more than a ton and a half of unused paper. Yikes! Thanks to an environmental initiative that has picked up steam this year, unused rolls of paper are no longer thrown away; they are donated to a homeless shelter. Congrats to the Grand Hyatt New York for choosing to spare a lot of wasted squares of TP.

So tell me, what does your property do with its unused rolls? Throw them away? Donate them? At what point is a roll removed from a room? After it is used by one guest? I will look forward to hearing from you.

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9/23/2008 1:39:00 PM #

Thank you Glenn, pleasure speaking with you as well. I would like to comment on how we made contact with the shelters. Thanks to the connections of   Rock and Wrap It Up Organization (an anti- poverty organization based in NY), we have been able to quickly and efficiently get in touch with the right people in the shelters.

RWU can help us all as they work with shelters nation wide, visit their site http://www.rockandwrapitup.org/contact.php or contact Founder Syd Mandelbaum sydmandelbaum@att.net. In the site you will see mostly food donations but they don’t stop there, they collect so much more.

RWU has put us in contact with different shelters, they have all the direct contacts and help us come together to fight poverty, reduce our waste and help the community. It is a WIN WIN situation.
We have been able to donate not just our toilet paper but also bruised toiletries and small-unwanted items that all add up and landfill is reduced. Our associates now even bring their unwanted clothes to donate. Moving forward, hotels should take advantage and partner up with this organization as they are very helpful in connecting facilities with local shelters, maybe right in your hometown.

Diana Beltran

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About Me

Glenn Hasek is the publisher and editor of Green Lodging News. He has more than 18 years of experience writing about the lodging industry. He can be reached at editor@greenlodgingnews.com or by phone at (440) 243-2055.