Mr. Lunn

Eco-Friendly Practices

Understanding Your Hotel’s Environmental Relationship

By Walker Lunn, Founder, EnviRelation, LLC

Consider this: US agricultural soil is lost 10 times faster than the natural replenishment rate. As a business leader, understanding your hotel’s environmental relationship is important because it provides insight into critical – not important, but critical – risks and opportunities.Relationships are give and take. Your hotel’s environmental relationship is what you take from the environment, and what you give to the environment. If the food, power, transportation, and water your hotel purchases are not critical to the success of the operation, you can stop reading here. If you believe that they are, then you understand that you must have a good relationship with the Earth.

If these resources are critical, then they deserve rigorous and comprehensive consideration and planning. A hotel can begin by listing all the things it takes from the planet to support daily operations, and a list of all the things a hotel “gives” back to the planet. Chances are, your hotel takes a lot of good things, and gives back a lot of bad things. Even properties with “green” certifications may find that for them, being green is not “good” for the environment; it is just being “less bad.”There is a break-even point on being “good” for the environment and most “green” certifications place organizations far below it.

This is about more than how “green” your guests think your hotel is. Most guests see green certifications as a good thing, but few understand the requirements and what that means for a hotel’s environmental relationship. David Jerome, Senior Vice President for Corporate Responsibility with InterContinental Hotels, wants guests to compare a night’s stay with InterContinental Hotels to a night’s stay in their own homefrom an environmental perspective. He believes this is a fair comparison and that IHG will outperform most homes in this respect. Making this comparison also encourages a guest to look to create change at home and to hold their hotel of choice to a higher standard. But outperforming your guests’ own environmental measures doesn’t mean you have a sustainable business model.

To begin understanding your environmental relationship, a manager should understand certain characteristics about the resources that they use. Examples are:

Stability of Supply

Understand how much of this resource is available, how often supplies are replenished, and if that rate of replenishment is changing. Beyond supply, you should understand the demand trends placed on that resource - what is the rate of demand, will that rate change, and what are the implications to your ability to acquire that resource at a reasonable price? A 2006 article by Susan Lang in Cornell’s Chronicle Online points out that US soil replenishment rates are far below the rate of loss. Other resources may not face the same situation. The USGS Sustainability of Ground-Water Resources is quick to point out that ground-water replenishment rates far exceed consumption rates nationally, but local variances could be significant. Food is another excellent example. As public opinion and science lean further away from industrial agriculture and heavy use of growth hormones, pesticides, and genetically modified, mono-culture crops, access to what is considered healthy, supple and safe food may pose a challenge.

Quality of Resource

Is the resource under influences that may make it more or less able to meet the need it is fulfilling? Studies have shown trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs in public water supply, and although quantities are small, they will only increase as they cannot be filtered out. How long will it be before the quality of public water is impacted to the degree that it cannot be used for the current purpose? This type of thinking is relevant for items such as food production and natural attractions that may draw guests to your property.

Cost of Resource

What costs are incurred to acquire the resource, and how will those be affected and by what? Many of these costs will be direct, such as transportation-related costs, but others will be embedded costs, such as the water or oil required to produce that resource. Scarcity of those inputs will have an impact on the cost as well as availability. In the book Let My People Go Surfing¬ by Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia, Yvon describes major steps Patagonia took to control product costs and encourage a positive environmental impact from their supply chain. He sets an inspiring example of how not taking “no” for an answer can create breakthroughs and lead to optimal solutions that meet all of the critical needs.

Once those characteristics are understood, a hotel should become aware of the trending issues associated with those resources. When weighing the action to take, keep in mind it may be safer to prepare for the worst and hope for the best! Some topics to consider include:

• organic and industrial farming
• genetically-modified (GMO) crops
• soil erosion
• water usage & freshwater supply
• fuel consumption in production
• biodiversity, in particularly as related to agriculture and seed availability
• human health, particularly as affected by food selection and availability

This relationship isn’t a “footprint.” Unlike a static “footprint,” this relationship is dynamic and is changing daily. Proper accounting- the complete execution of a “triple-bottom-line” philosophy- will enable the relationship to be managed for sustainability. Just like a property must be profitable from one period to the next to be considered financially sustainable, its relationship with the resources it requires must meet the same standard, only of environmental sustainability.

The value of such a plan shouldn’t be dismissed because the event horizon for which the plan prepares is beyond ownership’s intended investment period or beyond management’s intended involvement period. This restraint could be addressed creatively. One example is to show increased value for a more stable and prepared enterprise. The best managers leave good legacies. That should be value enough to take early action in a deliberate, planned and professional way.

Don’t be hasty to dismiss this notion. You may believe few in the industry are leading the way in truly passing break-even with their environmental relationship. But other industries are taking stock as we speak, addressing their environmental relationship under the name of environmental risk management.

IBM employs a Supplier Environmental Management Survey to assess its suppliers on their environmental performance. IBM takes the responses so seriously that they reach out to responders to address any negative response on the survey. Nick LiVigne, the Sustainability Program Lead with SAIC is focusing SAIC’s efforts “within the fence” for now, but sees that their subcontractors and supply chain will play a crucial role in maintaining good responses to surveys like IBM’s. Companies as different as Patagonia and Walmart are taking these concerns seriously; hotel managers should be too. And if you think it doesn’t matter because private equity is indifferent, think again. Investment firms of all sizes are surveying their portfolio companies. Savvy investors want to mitigate risk and will favor investments or management teams that do the best job.

Get started by reviewing a few widely adopted frameworks. If your property has already begunpursuing efficiencies and certifications, it will be useful to use a framework to help you step back and study the bigger picture. This will ensure that your strategy is tailored to your needs and that the tactics being employed truly work towards that strategy.

Examples of frameworks that provide perspective on your hotel’s environmental relationship include:

• Agenda 21
Agenda 21 is the output of the UN Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992. It is the “agenda” for mankind for the 21st century; addressing environmental threats within the window of opportunity to respond to those issues.

• Natural Step
The Natural Step has provided a framework that has catalyzed corporate sustainability leadership, with followers such as the legendary Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet.

• Hannover Principles
William McDonough Architects created a list of design principles for the World’s Fair EXPO in Hannover, Germany in 2000. These nine principles provide an inspiring and simple guideline for managing and understanding your hotels environmental relationship.

• Nature’s Services
This detailed book edited by Gretchen Daily illustrates a type of thinking that every manager should embrace in understanding their environmental relationship. The book takes a rigorous scientific and statistical approach to estimating the economic value of services provided by the planet, such as crop pollination by bees and water purification through the water cycle. The authors demonstrate the cost to mankind in supplanting these services with our own ingenuity. The thought patterns and methodology are advanced and can give a hotel manager an outstanding example of identifying their environmental risks.

• Global Reporting Initiative
Globally accepted and adopted, the Global Reporting Initiative reporting guidelines are the gold standard in social responsibility criteria. Creating a “GRI” Corporate Social Responsibility report is an exercise a business of any scale can undertake. The process and framework provide simple and comprehensive insight into an organizations environmental relationship. As demonstrated by the Willard InterContinental under the leadership of former General Manager Herve Houdre, this reporting framework can be valuable even at the property level.

You must understand your true environmental relationship. In a rapidly changing world with 7 billion people, the most important question to ask is “when does ‘green’ stop meaning ‘less bad’ and start meaning ‘good’?”

Walker T. Lunn is the founding Member and Manager of EnviRelation, LLC. EnviRelation is the mid-Atlantic’s leading provider of food composting services. EnviRelation helps hotels and restaurants save money on waste disposal by offering affordable, environmentally friendly food composting services. This sustainable alternative to waste management has been widely adopted in the areas serviced by EnviRelation. Over the past four years, EnviRelation, LLC has worked with the Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott hotel groups, Sodexo, University of Maryland, Alexandria City Public School district, area hospitals, and many more customers in an effort to help the hospitality industry reduce its carbon footprint and maintain affordable, sustainable practices throughout the United States and abroad. Mr. Lunn frequently speaks on topics pertaining to sustainability, hospitality, composting, and entrepreneurship. Mr. Lunn can be contacted at 202-465-4802 or info@envirelation.com Extended Bio...

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