MCLEAN, VA.—Hilton Worldwide announced the 2011 results of LightStay, the company’s proprietary sustainability measurement system. Overall, the program has been a success with more than $147 million in cumulative savings from efficiency projected for hotels reporting through LightStay. Additionally, Hilton Worldwide has achieved its five-year goal to reduce total waste output by 20 percent, a full two years ahead of schedule.
The company also reports it is on track to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions by 20 percent, and water consumption by 10 percent. Since the introduction of LightStay, the company has reduced its carbon output by 10.9 percent, waste output by 23.3 percent, energy use by 9.7 percent, and water use by 7.5 percent.
“Sustainability is an increasing focus across all our brands and is critical to the operations of our business,” said Christopher J. Nassetta, president and CEO, Hilton Worldwide. “LightStay provides us with a global platform to respond to the challenges of managing natural resource constraints, and Hilton Worldwide is dedicated to empowering our property owners and operators with tools that improve economic and sustainability performance at all levels of our company.”
Almost 4,000 Hotels Participating
Hilton Worldwide completed the adoption of LightStay across the company’s more than 3,900 properties in 91 countries in 2011 and is now tracking more than 450 million square feet of build space within the system—an amount greater than all the office spaces in New York City and 10 times all hotel rooms in Las Vegas. The company also recently integrated the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative (HCMI) 1.0 methodology spearheaded by the International Tourism Partnership (ITP) and World Travel & Tourism Council into LightStay. It can be applied to any of its properties worldwide if requested. As part of the LightStay Meeting Calculator, Hilton Worldwide also can provide customers with real-time data on food, travel and operational practices for any its properties.
Every brand and hotel globally is required by brand standards to measure and make continual improvements to their overall sustainability results as part of LightStay, and, to support these efforts, the system includes a “social network” dashboard that allows properties from around the world to “neighbor” one another and share information, dialogue on a topic or compare respective performance.
To date, Hilton Worldwide has nearly 2,000 neighbors in LightStay and more than 5,000 improvement projects that highlight different approaches to common sustainability challenges. For example, Hilton Americas—Houston Texas converted to using biodiesel as a preferable fuel, allowing the hotel to recycle 14,000 pounds of kitchen oil and divert seven tons of oil-based food waste from landfills. In South America, the DoubleTree Guest Suites by Hilton Paracas Peru uses a wastewater reclamation plant that is independent of the area sewage system and cleans wastewater to a quality that can be used for watering the hotel’s garden areas, and, in Europe, Hilton Malta uses sea water to cool its air-conditioning system.
ISO 14001 Volume Certification
As a result of the 2011 LightStay results, Hilton Worldwide maintains its ISO 14001 certification for Environmental Management Systems, which continues to be one of the largest ever volume certifications of commercial buildings. DEKRA Certification, Inc. performs ongoing annual audits to assess the LightStay data and monitor compliance.
Hilton Worldwide is recognized for its leadership in sustainability by various organizations such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Civic Leadership Center and more as a result of its achievements including:
• Partnering with Global Soap Project to recycle more than 17,000 pounds of soap that have been reprocessed into more than 68,000 bars to help prevent diarrheal disease and pneumonia among vulnerable populations in developing countries;
• Implementing Good 360 to allow the company’s 3,900 hotels to donate goods to more than 2,000 organizations in need globally—resulting in an estimated value of more than $5.5 million for community partners;
• Launching the Center for Sustainable Procurement to help global business procurement managers integrate sustainability into their purchasing decisions—providing a unique set of research and information that will help make sense of the increasingly available product sustainability data;
• Creating the Hilton LightStay Sustainability Award in partnership with the Sundance Institute to provide a platform for filmmakers to tell stories to catalyze change and elevate dialogue around critical global issues; and
• Purchasing more than 450 million kilowatt hours of green power over the last few years, and in 2012 this was enough to meet 94 percent of the company’s annual electricity use in the United States and rank as a top 10 purchaser of renewable energy.
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