Carbon Footprint of our Hotels

May 1, 2007 by john ackers

We all know that hotels waste energy on a grand scale but how bad is it? Carbon trust say current estimates indicate that this sector consumes 142 PJ of delivered energy a year, which equates to 3.19 MtC/yr, worth around £800 million at current prices. I think that is about 2% of UK carbon emissions.

-Guests open hotel windows and still leave the air conditioning on. Some hotels have solved that problem by putting a microswitch on the window that disconnects the air conditioning when the window is open.

-Hotels fit interlocks on the door of the room to disable the power to the room when the guest leaves the room. But guests deliberately thwart their good efforts by sticking a credit card slot or anything else into the slot to keep the power on the room while they are gone.

-Chefs waste an enormous amount of water and energy.

These are the views of hotel management that got together at a hospitality conference last week. A search on google would indicate that this is virgin territory. I have not been able to find any hotel chains that have published the carbon footprint of any of their rooms. The Queens hotel Penzance talks about their carbon footprint but doesn't actually say what it is.

The Los Angeles Times claims that hotels are now offering to offset the emissions. But that's hardly the point. Top marks to the Doubletree Hotel in Portland who have eliminated their Airport Shuttle, suggesting that guests should use the light rail system instead.

What would be great is if every hotel calculated its carbon footprint. We could take the total carbon emissions of a hotel and divide it by the total number of days that each and every room is occupied and that will give us the carbon footprint for one night in room. Then we can rank one hotel's room with another. Now that would be useful.

Related site: Hospitable Climates