Save our planet. Please reuse your towel.
For as long as I’ve been staying in hotels as an adult, over 12 years now, almost all hotels ask you to reuse your towel (and they should).
This is one of those small things that when you start to really think about it, as I recently have, leads you down a rabbit hole.
Some hotels have over 7000 rooms (they do exist) — that’s a lot of towels.
And then there are the little bars of soap in the bathroom. You can’t reuse those easily. For a nights stay they might only get used a handful of times.
Examining this at a macro-scale, the numbers are quite astounding (and not in a good way).
Methodology
Reassuringly, I’m not alone in wanting to learn more about this area of hospitality. In Chekitan Dev and Prateek Kumar from the School of Hospitality Administration (Boston University) conducted a study titled; A Detailed Study of the Expected and Actual Use of Hotel Amenities, that I have used as the foundation for this post.
For all other calculations I used publicly accessible data to calculate the estimates.
Results
Amenity use by hotel guests (2019)
| Actual % | |
|---|---|
| Auto check in | 1.00% |
| In room fitness equipment | 1.67% |
| Restaurant dinner | 2.33% |
| … | … |
| Packaged soap | 86.67% |
| TV | 87.33% |
| Closet | 88.00% |
Auto checkin isn’t really taking off looking at these numbers, nor is restaurant dining at hotels (the latter surprises me).
The majority of guests, 86.67%, all use the packaged soap placed in the rooms bathroom.
Towels are not listed as amenities, but I’d assume their usage amongst guests to be almost 100%.
Number of Hotel Rooms (top 15 hotels by rooms) (2019)
The number of worldwide hotel rooms varies, due to differences in classification. I was however able to find some good numbers quoted for the 15 leading hotels (by total number of rooms).
Worldwide, Marriott has by far the largest number of hotel rooms, 1.43 million, almost 400,000 more than the second largest hotel chain by room number, Hilton, with 1.04 million.
In total, the top 15 hotels operate a total of 6.33 million hotel rooms.
According to most sources, average occupancy rates at hotels lie between 65% and 80% worldwide.
At 65% occupancy, total occupied hotel rooms amongst these brands is equal to about 4.11 million rooms occupied per night. At 80%, occupancy is 5.06 million. And at 72.5%, occupancy is roughly 4.59 million.
Laundry, at scale
According to TUI:
Every 10kg towel wash consumes at least 50 litres of water and 1.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity, so 3 per cent saves 129,000 litres of water, which means CO₂ emissions for the hotel can be cut by 1,676 kg.
Bath towels are about 0.75kg each. So let’s assume 1kg when slightly wet.
Using the Marriott as an example, at a 72.5% occupancy rate this would mean about 1.04 million kilograms of towels might need to be washed per day. Using the figures above this would require 5.18 million litres of water (enough to fill 2 2.5 million litre Olympic swimming pools) and 124k kilowatt-hours of electricity!
For all 15 hotels that’s 22.93 million litres of water per day (8.37 billion litres per year) and 550,291 kwh of electricity per day (200.9 million kwh per year).
In the UK (according to the UK Government reporting, and thus specific to the UK energy grid):
0.233 kg of CO2e per kWh of electricity
Using this estimation, a rough estimate is that Marriott emits 28,970 kg (28.97 tons) of CO2 everyday just to wash towels.
CO2 Emissions amongst the top 15 chains listed calculates co2 emissions to wash towels to be 128,217 kg per day (or 46.8 million tons of co2 per year)!
I suspect 30%-40% of towels are reused per day (so 70%-60% need to be washed). Assuming the best case, that 40% of towels are reused, it would require 5.02 billion litres of water per year and cause 28.08 million tons of co2 emissions per year.
Throwaway soap
Using the same occupancy rate as before as well as the assumption that 86.67% of guest use soap; Marriott replaces 898k bars of used soap a day, and almost 4 million bars of soap are replaced each day across the 15 hotel chains.
Yearly that’s 1.45 billion bars of soap replaced by these hotels!
These figures are probably an underestimation because I only counted per room. If more than one person is staying in a room, it is likely the second person will open their own bar of soap. However, I will ignore this in my analysis.
Hotels take great pride in selecting their toiletries, and invest a tremendous amount of time and money into finding the right brand partners, and they are not paying retail prices at this scale. Retail is obviously much higher (e.g. $6 for just 10 soaps here at the time of writing).
Let’s assume each bar of soap costs the hotel between $0.05 and $0.10 at this scale (I couldn’t find any particularly citable cost references here). That’s about $200k and $400k respectively spent by these 15 brands each day on replacement soap (or $72 million and $145 million yearly).
The environmental cost of this one use amenity is also staggering. Assuming the average bar weighs 15g in packaging, and let’s assume 14g when opened and used once or twice, gives a figure of about 56,642 kg of soap thrown away per day (20.31 million kg’s or 20,310 tons of soap a year) — that’s a lot of landfill.
Improvements
Whilst almost all the numbers used in this post are estimates, it would be interesting to consider these estimates on a global scale. If the top 15 hotels run a total of 6.33 million hotel rooms, there must be significantly more when all hotels are considered (I’d conservatively estimate at least 4 times the estimates in this post).
tl;dr
I estimate over $145 million could be spent yearly on soap by the 15 largest hotel chains (by number of rooms). That buys them 1.45 billion bars of soap — that are probably only ever used once — weighing 20.31 million kilograms.