Going green: restaurants and hotels avoid plastic, upcycle waste and plant roof gardens
In Hong Kong, 3,000 restaurants no longer hand out plastic cutlery to takeaway customers, bars have replaced plastic straws, hotels change bedlinen less often, and chefs attain the ultimate in local sourcing: from their own roofs
With shocking images circulating in recent years of Hong Kong beaches awash with plastic waste, the city’s hotels, restaurants and bars have got the message and taken initiatives to reduce their use of the polluting material.
Outlets such as Grassroots Pantry, PDT, Potato Head, Flamingo Bloom and DiVino Wine Bar and Restaurant have recently stopped using plastic straws, replacing them with paper or metal ones or doing away with them entirely.
Hotels, meanwhile, ask guests whether they need their bedlinen changed every day. As well as ceasing its use of plastic straws, the Landmark Mandarin Oriental upcycles waste, has introduced more sustainable bathroom amenities in partnership with Cochine, a developer of luxury fragrances and diffusers based in Vietnam, and plans to plant a rooftop garden.
Cochine helped the hotel develop chemical-free shampoos, conditioners, liquid soaps and lotions using coconut oil and olive oil. The company’s founder, Kate Crofton-Atkins, approached the five-star hotel a year ago, offering to help it significantly reduce its use of single-use plastic.
“One would think the easiest thing to do would be to put them [shampoo, soap] in large containers, but they also need to be tamper-proof, refillable, and plastic-free,” says Crofton-Atkins, who previously worked for L’Oreal.
