Six Senses shares learnings on eliminating plastic in industry-wide resource

Six Senses has released a resource for the hospitality industry sharing its learnings on eliminating plastic from hotel operations.

The Journey to Plastic Freedom Playbook features 82 “tried and tested” solutions to plastic items in the four main areas of housekeeping, back of house, food and beverage, and spa. Items being eliminated range from plastic bags and toothpaste tubes to coffee capsules and brooms.

Six Senses has distributed the resource to the 6,400 properties under parent company IHG Hotels & Resorts, and now plans to share it with the wider industry.

The brand will host a webinar on November 6 for anyone working in the hospitality industry who wants to learn more, with all attendees receiving a downloadable copy of the playbook. From then, the playbook will be available to download online.

Six Senses has been focused on eliminating single-use plastic since the brand was founded in the mid-1990s.

Following a successful plastic-free pilot at Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives in 2016, the brand commissioned a group-wide inventory of every plastic item within its operations and launched a training campaign for all staff across its 27 hotels.

“We decided to make a really strong push on plastic back in 2017,” said vice-president of sustainability Jeff Smith.

“We had already eliminated straws, plastic water bottles and plastic shampoo bottles, so we were looking at where to go next. We decided, instead of making an incremental step forward, to make a massive push on plastic.

“Fast forward to 2022, we were wrapping this up and collecting the learnings, which is always the biggest outcome of doing these big, moon-shot goals. We started collecting the best practices and stories from the hotels, and we were organising them into this booklet, which we needed as a training resource internally. As soon as we started doing that, we thought, why make it an internal document only? Why not share it publicly? The bigger picture is we want the whole industry to get off the plastic addiction and it's a community-scale issue.”

He added: “[The 82 solutions] are not brand standards. Someone on the ground has tried this out, and it has worked. It doesn't mean they'll all work for you. Everyone's in a different situation, but it did work somewhere, and I think that's a powerful message, especially for hotel operators who sometimes get very theoretical things, and [don’t know how to] implement [them].”

The Journey to Plastic Freedom Playbook was written and edited by the brand’s in-house sustainability leaders in partnership with industry experts including Rachel McCaffery, chief executive of sustainable tourism consultancy Green Case; Ally Dragozet, chief executive of marine consultancy Sea Going Green; Phil Bloomfield, founder of communications agency Ready to Bloom; and Jo Hendrick, founder of sustainable tourism initiative Travel Without Plastic.

The resource focuses on eliminating plastic, rather than just recycling.

“Every minute a garbage truck of plastic ends up in the ocean, and that's with all of the world's recycling systems in place,” Smith said.

“One third of recyclable plastic that is sent to recycling does not get recycled, and that's because of inefficiencies in this whole recycling system. My take on this is that recycling as a solution is a myth that is not working, it's failing us. We've been trying to do it since the 90s, and we still have plastic in the ocean - that kind of speaks for itself. What we wanted to do was tackle this upstream and not downstream.”

Smith said he hoped the Journey to Plastic Freedom Playbook would be a “useful resource” for the industry.

“I would be thrilled if even a couple of hotels picked it up and found one or two useful bits of advice - that [will have] achieved our goal,” he said.

“To be very ambitious, I would love to hope that every hotel [would] consider it at least and anywhere in between there we'll be happy - as long as it gets used by someone.”

Six Senses chief executive Neil Jacobs added: “Sustainability is a defining characteristic of what luxury means to us. We are sharing our playbook with other hotel groups because the issue needs collective action if we are to make a real impact on our environment. If that means sharing our trade secrets with the wider industry, then so be it.”

Six Senses was one of the first signatories of the Global Tourism Plastics Initiative, led by the UN Environment Programme and UN World Tourism Organization, in 2019 and collaborated with the United States Coalition on Sustainability and SustainChain in 2021 to connect initiatives and scale solutions.

The brand continues to make advances in other areas of sustainability. In 2023, the Six Senses Sustainability Fund financed 60 projects in partnership with 57 partner organisations, which collectively resulted in 25,412 community members with improved access to healthcare and 9,254 with improved public waste management.