As we head into the summer, leisure and tourism businesses will be preparing for an extremely busy season - especially over the school holidays, when parents will be looking for things to do to keep their children occupied.
During these busy seasons, it can be easy to lose sight of secondary business objectives and focus solely on delivering your primary work. With demand so high, it’s understandable that resources have to be pulled away from things like sustainability.
However, this can lead to further problems later down the line. When it comes to sustainability reporting, citing ‘being too busy during the summer months’ won’t look too good on your ESG report.
So, what actions can you take to ensure you’re still meeting sustainability goals during the busy season?
Saving paper is one of the easiest things you can do as a business to help improve your sustainability. According to Business Waste, 10 million tonnes of paper are used and disposed of in the UK every year, and around 20% of all UK waste is paper.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to save paper in the leisure and tourism industry is to make the switch to digital receipts, especially since the thermal paper that’s widely used for receipts cannot be recycled.
When you consider how many customers you serve during the summer months, you could save a significant amount of paper by simply asking them for an email address and sending their receipts digitally.
As the busy summer season approaches, it’s a good idea to plan ahead so that you can reduce as much waste as possible.
One way to do this is to bulk purchase your supplies - whether it’s ingredients for the kitchen, towels for your hotel rooms or takeaway food containers. By looking at previous years’ activity and using these figures to forecast what quantity of supplies you need for this year, you can avoid having to re-order supplies part-way through the summer. This will mean that you can reduce the amount of packaging waste, as everything will be delivered together.
Using previous years’ figures to forecast how many supplies you need this year will also prevent you from over-ordering. There’s nothing worse from a sustainability point of view than having to throw away unused supplies that can’t be used another time, like fresh food.
Although, if you do end up with leftover food and ingredients - don’t panic. There are many ways that you can be sustainable with leftovers, such as donating them to a local food bank, gifting them to colleagues, freezing them or introducing initiatives such as Too Good To Go.
Recycling sounds like the most basic way to encourage sustainability in your business, but it needs to be done properly - otherwise, there’s no point doing it at all.
There’s no denying that the leisure and tourism industry creates a lot of waste and much of this is plastic waste. According to Business Waste, a 200-room hotel uses around 300,000 bits of single-use plastic every month - this can be shampoo bottles, shower gel bottles and toothpaste tubes.
To reduce plastic pollution, make sure that recycling bins are available and clearly labelled for both customers and staff to use. It’s also your responsibility as a business to make sure your recycling waste is handled correctly, so make sure you’re aware of the guidance from your local council on how to separate recycling and how/when they collect it.
To take this one step further, you can also take action to try and minimise single-use plastic in the first place. For example, as a hotel, you could consider implementing refillable shampoo and shower gel bottles in your rooms. Or as a hospitality business, make sure that things like straws, takeaway cutlery and takeaway containers aren’t made from single-use plastic.
When you consider how busy leisure and tourism businesses are in the summer months, it’s no surprise that they have to take lots of deliveries of supplies to help meet demand.
Whilst this is unavoidable, one way to reduce your carbon footprint and be more sustainable is to source locally. By picking a local supplier, you will reduce the distance that goods have to travel, contributing to lower carbon emissions and improving the sustainability of your supply chain.
What’s more, not only is this better for the environment but you’ll also be supporting small, local businesses and having a positive impact on the local economy.
If you work in the leisure and tourism industry and are looking for business and accounting advice, you can contact our head of leisure and tourism, Michele Coe-Baxter.
Alternatively, if you’re looking for advice on how to make your business more sustainable, as sustainability champion, you can contact me, Sally-Anne Hurn.
