Historically, waste management in South Africa has focused mainly on technologies such as landfilling – for general and hazardous waste – and incineration – for medical waste. With the introduction of the ‘National Environmental Management Act’ and the ‘National Environment Management: Waste Act’, waste management in South Africa has evolved to include additional requirements such as waste minimisation and recycling.
Verde Hotels is a sustainable property development company, whose holistic approach to developing environmentally conscious properties is making its mark with significant, positive results around waste minimisation and management strategies and processes.
It is also supremely important to inform, educate and get the buy-in of staff, stakeholders, guests and the community to support and sustain environmental initiatives at ground level.
The hotel actions and encourages responsible procurement, buys in bulk and uses eco-friendly alternatives; the hotel’s staff bottle their own water in reusable bottles and promote operations that minimise waste in general. As a result, the figures for Hotel Verde Cape Town are phenomenal, having exceeded their waste-to-landfill targets of 85 per cent set in 2013 to 97.06 per cent in 2018.
To bolster in-house efforts it is a good idea for hotels to align themselves with waste contractors who understand the complexities of waste management, who comply with environmental legislation and are able to offer advice on the most environmentally friendly and cost-efficient methods of disposal. It is good to note that there are more than 200 waste service providers operating in the Western Cape alone, across the full value chain, i.e. collection, transportation, disposal, recycling, sorting, storage and cleaning.
Zero to Land Fill Organics is a company which provides training, educational material and separation systems for the setting up of organic waste separation programmes to business, as well as a service to collect and compost source-separated food waste, paper towel from bathrooms and garden waste.
These are just a few of the very powerful reasons why waste management as part of your sustainability strategy is key in helping to protect the environment and sustain its natural resources for current and future generations. And, as staff members at Hotel Verde can be heard echoing the owner, Mario Delicio’s chime of, ‘waste is value for Verde Hotels, but the best is waste that is avoided completely’ – imagine if we all changed our perceptions.
