Amid growing global crisis on plastic pollution, Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain will ban small plastic shampoo bottles by 2020. As Marriott said Wednesday it will eliminate small plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner and bath gel from its hotel rooms worldwide by December 2020. Depending on the hotel,they’ll be replaced with larger bottles or wall-mounted dispensers.
IHG, which owns Holiday Inn, Kimpton and other brands made a similar announcement last month sayying it will eliminate about 200 million tiny bottles each year by 2021. Walt Disney Co. Also said last year that it would replace small plastic shampoo bottles at its resorts and on its cruise ships. Smaller companies, like the five Soneva Resorts in Thailand and the Maldives, have also discarded plastic bottles.
Marriott international has more than 7,000 hotels in 131 countries under 30 brands, ranging from SpringHill Suites and Residence Inn to Sheraton and Ritz-Carlton. It says it will be eliminating about 500 million small bottles each year, or 1.7 million pounds of plastic.
Marriott international’s Rival Hyatt Hotels Corp. is also going through a similar process now. The company says it’s been testing amenity dispensers in some rooms for the last year.
Maryland-based Marriott Bethesda started replacing small bottles early last year at some North American brands, including Courtyard and Fairfield hotels. About 1,000 of those now featured pump dispensers are hooked to the shower wall.
The larger bottles will still be plastic, and Marriott still plans to replace them — not just “Plastic pollution is an urgent global crisis and the time is now to think ‘reusable’ instead of ‘disposable,'” as said by Dianna Cohen, co-founder and CEO of the Berkeley, California-based Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Shortly, hotels may not have a choice as Lawmakers in California are considering banning hotels from using small shampoo bottles in 2023, while the European Union is banning a wide range of single-use plastic items, like cutlery and plates, by 2021.
