Increasingly, hotels are eliminating small plastic bottles of shampoo, moisturizing lotion, body wash and conditioner in favor of larger containers affixed to countertops and shower walls that housekeeping staff can refill as they get low.
But what used to be just an eco-friendly move is now becoming law in several states. New York has become the latest to jump onto the sustainability bandwagon, says the New York Post, noting, “Beginning on Jan. 1, 2025, hotels with more than 50 rooms will not be able to provide toiletry bottles under 12 ounces, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s website. The act, which was first introduced in 2019, defines “hospitality personal care product” as a “product provided by a hotel and intended to be applied to or used on the human body or any part thereof for cleansing,” the legislation states.”
Oh, and there are consequences for those who don’t cooperate. Hotels will have to pay $250 for initial violations, and $500 for each subsequent infraction. All of the money raised from fines will go toward New York’s Environmental Protection Fund, according to The New York Times.
Some states, like Washington, have passed laws that go into effect in the future, while others, like California, already have.
Hotel Management Network says that ahead of the states’ adoptions of measures, many of the big chains have already eliminated what are known as single-use plastics from their consumer offerings. In April 2019, Marriott announced that it was ending the use of give-away toiletries in all of its hotels before the end of the year. (Several of its hotel brands had already offered a pilot program that used larger, refillable bottles with pump dispensers in 2018.)
Marriott estimated at the time that banning such items in its properties would stop 500 million small single-use plastic bottles from being thrown away every year. This amounts to saving 1.7 million pounds of single-use plastic per year. Hyatt announced a similar plan for its hotels, and Hilton said it would follow suit. And Scripps News noted that IHG Hotels & Resorts announced a similar around the same time as the other chains. The company estimated 200 million bathroom mini bottles were used every year across its properties.
The numbers are something nobody can afford to ignore any longer, say environmentalists.
“A person staying at a hotel may use a small plastic bottle for shampoo once, possibly twice to wash their hair and then that bottle quickly becomes waste. Multiply that by thousands, tens of thousands, of people who stay in hotels each night and that’s a lot of plastic waste,” said Christy Leavitt, the plastics campaign director at Oceana, an ocean conservation nonprofit. "An estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the oceans every year. That's roughly equivalent to dumping two garbage trucks full of plastic into the oceans every minute."
While plastic containers of body wash have supplanted the small soap bars in many hotels, those little bars are still widely used. Clean The World is an organization that collects those partially used (or barely used, in some cases) bars of soap and mills them into larger bars that are then shipped to areas where poor hygiene, including a shortage of soap, often leads to infections and disease.
And in case you’re wondering, Clean the World’s soap recycling and manufacturing multi-step process includes rigorous testing by the Biological Consulting Services Laboratory, a fully accredited third-party laboratory, which tests the newly-made bars of soap for any and all contaminants. First, the used bars of soap are ground into pellets and finely refined to eliminate any foreign particles. Then, they are sterilized, refined again, and manufactured into brand-new bars of soap.
Clean The World, which also gathers plastic amenities, like small disposable shampoo bottles, lists multiple major U.S. hotel and accommodations chain among its hospitality partners.
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