The Athenee Hotel in Bangkok is refining luxury together with environmental responsibility

Recently, business sustainability initiatives, such as going carbon-neutral, have become popular among businesses. Due to the high business needs and demand for adopting sustainability movements, many businesses and enterprises have been exploring ways to adopt sustainable initiatives.

To that end, The Athenee Hotel Bangkok, a Luxury Collection Hotel in the Thai capital, has set a global standard for environmentally conscious and socially responsible hospitality practices by becoming the world's first hotel to be awarded ISO 20121 certification for Event Sustainability Management Systems.

In addition, the hotel is also the first in Asia to earn the Verified Responsible Hospitality badge, awarded through an independent assessment by Forbes Travel Guide. This accolade confirms the hotel's unwavering commitment to sustainability, guest and associate well-being, and active community engagement.

Food waste reimagined through sustainability

As the learnings of the ISO certification have shown, one of the most significant components of waste in the hospitality industry is food waste, which remains the top priority for The Athenee Hotel Bangkok.

In addition, the hotel's journey towards zero food waste has resulted in some innovative uses for food that would otherwise be discarded, along with continuous work on new uses for food scraps, with new ideas from guests and associates.

"Our efforts around food waste also support our waste management and recycling efforts," said Mr Gill Baurieres, Executive Assistant Manager at The Athenee Hotel. "We invested in a compost machine in 2022 for kitchen practices like fruit peels and trimmed foods that will go to our on-property compost machine to produce fertilisers for gardening and also sharing with the local organic farmers as well as public parks who are our partners."

Baurieres added that since this year's acquisition of a new compost machine with more capacity, food waste per cover from their associates has been divided by three compared to last year.

He also shared that the hotel operates a program called Food Rescue, where innovative uses are found for kitchen scraps. For instance, Fruit trimmings are made into jam or vinegar, bones into broth, seafood shells are ground up to form chicken feed, and fruit and vegetable peels can be transformed into a very effective cleaning paste.

Enhancements towards a greener future

The strong emphasis on sustainability follows efforts over the past decade to implement a wide range of initiatives to reduce its ecological footprint and contribute to a greener future.

For instance, when the hotel rooms were renovated, the recycling of materials helped reduce wastage. Almost all the furniture received a stylish makeover from the original pieces, such as the headboards from the old beds, which found a new purpose instead of being scrapped.

In addition, the focus on developing sustainable practices was extended to other parts of the hotel operation, such as energy savings and the development of organic food and beverage products.

Moving forward, the hotel is dedicated to improving all the existing initiatives further and combining them with new goals, such as reducing the usage of single-use plastics and paper by 20% in 2024, developing a plan to improve the Indoor Air Quality for both guests and associates in the upcoming two years, and achieving at least one international hospitality sustainability certification.