The hotel industry generates nearly 4 million tons of waste each year, including over 1 million tons of food waste. With 83% of travelers worldwide confirming that sustainable travel is important to them (per Booking.com’s 2024 Sustainable Travel report), reducing food waste and increasing overall diversion rates is a key objective of many hotels.
Hotels demonstrate their commitment to sustainability by achieving certifications through organizations such as GreenKey Global. To achieve high ratings in these sustainability certification programs, hotels must improve measurement of waste materials.
Collecting reliable consistent materials data remains a challenge for many hotel properties. Invoices and remittances for waste and recycling activities are processed by local staff at each hotel. The staff has many responsibilities, with high clerical turnover. Therefore, gathering and interpreting confusing waste and recycling invoices is not a high priority. When the data is processed, it is often incomplete or provided in an incorrect unit of measure.
How Z3 Data Addresses Waste Data Collection Challenge
Z3, utilizing Zenbi (our waste data ingestion engine), offers a solution to automate the collection of waste and recycling data for each hotel. Hotel staff signs a Letter of Authorization that allows Z3 to collect relevant waste infrastructure data and request that waste haulers copy [email protected] on all waste bills and remittances.
Zenbi processes and automatically ingests the waste data, allowing for timely outputs in a structured format. The data is formatted to be transferred into the client’s sustainability software.
Z3 also recognizes the opportunity for local waste audits and connects hotel properties with consultants to perform on-site audits. These audit results are stored in the Z3 system and analyzed to identify waste diversion opportunities and measure progress against benchmarks.
Partnering with Z3, client hotels realize the following benefits:
- Increased accuracy and timeliness of reporting in to sustainability systems
- Reduction in administrative staff time to process waste data
- Cost saving opportunities by right-sizing bin service.
- Recommendations to reduce diversion rates by comparing local property performance against peers.
The Z3 solution allows the lean local hotel team to focus on guest satisfaction, while providing the corporate sustainability team with the data required to measure environmental impacts and strategies to reduce them.
Connect with us today to learn more.