In its vocation to continue leading a model of responsible tourism, Iberostar Group has implemented the first department in the hotel sector to eliminate waste in 41 hotel chain hotels through the creation of 3R equipment(Reduce - Reuse - Recycle).
In its ambitious goal of becoming a waste-free hotel group by 2025, these teams have already been successfully implemented in 17 hotels of the chain in Spain and in others 24 of the Group in the AmericasThe waste that ends up in rejects is drastically reduced, segregated correctly and recycled more accurately.
The 3R equipmentcurrently made up of a global team of more than 130 peopleThe principles of the circular economy (reduce, reuse and recycle) and is responsible for sorting, weighing and analyse waste products that enter and are used in the Iberostar hotels with the aim of finding a value for them at the end of their use.
These new 3R teams are already deployed at 7 Iberostar hotels in Balearic Islands, 2 in Andalusia and 8 in Canary Islands. In its presence in the Americas, the Group has incorporated these departments in 11 of its hotels in Mexico, 3 in Jamaica, 7 in the Dominican Republic and 3 in Brazil.. During 2022, Grupo Iberostar will continue to incorporate 3R equipment in the rest of the company's hotels to continue collecting, measuring and understanding waste in order to identify the changes needed to gradually reduce it.
Rodrigo Moscardó, Chief Operating Officer of Iberostar Group, explica que “con la creación paulatina de los equipos 3R en nuestros hoteles, centralizamos la gestión de residuos de todas las áreas bajo un grupo específico y especializado de personas. Su función es clave para apoyar un sistema de mejora continua mediante el análisis de los desperdicios generados en cada área y es fundamental para convertirnos en una empresa libre de residuos en 2025. Además, esta es una iniciativa económicamente rentable, una prueba más de que la sostenibilidad no significa aumento de costes”.
The new 3R teams are responsible for helping other colleagues to make hotels recycle better. To this end, they work with material means for waste management, from litter bins and containers to compactors, shredders, electric trolleys, improved storage facilities and tablets for auditing waste separation and weighing.. They also use an intelligent system that supports this work and that calculates the weight of the material that goes into each container and provides real data on the waste generated, as well as the type of each type of waste. This data is transferred to a database in the cloud where each container has been previously registered. Each month, the teams analyse these dataThe reports are used to create reports whose conclusions translate into better decision making to reduce consumption even further.
Saving ecosystems
Avoiding waste generation is key to ecosystem restoration. Therefore, following the objective of the Iberostar Group's own Agenda 2030 in order not to generate no waste by 2025the chain is working on the waste measurement and management both in hotels and before they arrive, by monitoring processes and investing in measurement and reporting tools to identify the changes needed to move towards a circular economy.
In addition, Grupo Iberostar is reducing the overall production of food waste by 15-30% in all its operations.s and encourages the entire company to manage the reuse of products in its facilities.