Going Green in the Hospitality Industry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Going Green in the Hospitality Industry - Essay Example As such, the environment and its conservation have become a selling point for even airlines, where green airlines are even getting the bulk of passengers in air travel as can be seen in Continental airlines that has gone a step further to use biofuels. Consequently, hotels and other allied industries have taken competition a notch higher in order to make a kill in terms of revenue as has been seen with the Orchid Mumbai that is eco-certified making it highly competitive as compared to other five star hotels like itself (Ernst and Young 6). This is also because clients and other allied parties demand green programs, as well as their sense of corporate responsibility, where the industry, especially hotels do not intend to harm the environment with waste products. Hotels, as part of the hospitality industry could apply a number of measures that see to it that environmental conservation is enhanced and maintained. With this in mind, attempts at energy conservation are seen as the most si gnificant means through which the industry can go green, which serves both institutions and the environment, from which angle it can be viewed as humans being part of the environment. Hotels have gone green with genius ways of saving on energy both financially and best of all consumption, where their lighting systems consume just a fraction of conventional systems found at home and at non-green hotels. Energy conservations involves energy saving bulbs and other lighting systems consuming minimum energy for best results coupled with other solutions. The other solutions entail bright coloring that allows for large amounts of reflection, which requires lesser lighting than rooms with dark colors. From this perspective, some hotels are using LED (light emitting diodes) lighting, which consumes low power, as can be seen in the case of Econo Lodge hotels in the US ("LED Lighting Helps..."). Going green has also been achieved through tier systems that work as a bundle such as infrared sens ors that monitor brightness and switching lights on and off. The concept saves the industry more than 12 kilowatts of electricity produced and wasted by production and consumption. Other green initiatives in hospitality can be seen in air conditioning as seen in Japanese institutions, where there is a unique system of harvesting snow during winter and storing it up for use during summer, when it is hot. This works by cooling hotels and apartments using Japanese All-Air-Systems (Skogsberg 7). In waste management, the industry has the potential to improve its green imitative due certain aspects that involve recycling, reusing and reducing production of waste. On the production of waste, manufacturers of packaging items and materials are aware that what they produce ends up as waste. As a result, it the responsibility of hotels, travel agencies and other institutions in the hospitality industry to save the environment by choosing wisely and keeping of too much wrap on items. With this in mind, certain institutions have managed to do this by coming up with genius policies such as introduction of the hospitality and food service agreement that serves to ensure that there is not much waste in packaging by reducing, reusing and recycling ("Small Hotel makes..." 2). A