Green businesses

Staying in a Westin Hotel recently I found the sign to hang from the door knob whose picture you see on the left. I'll let you observe it for a moment before continuing to read this post...

This is one sign where the hotel management supposedly promotes ways to conserve natural resources. Nothing apparently wrong with that. If you tried to read it, however, the resolution of the image is not enough to comfortably read it, because Blogger didn't allow me to upload a higher resolution image, so I'll transcribe the first paragraph:

"You have the option to decline housekeeping service for the day. For helping us conserve natural resources, we are happy to offer you a $5 gift card for use at participating food and beverage outlets within our hotel or 500 SPG® Startpoints^SM redeemable at checkout"

Do you know why this sign caught my attention?

Because I don’t see why, declining housekeeping service for a day makes a green option. What is the natural resource they are conserving? The way I see it, they are saving money, period! Aren’t the people who do the housekeeping natural resources? And I don’t mean to be disrespectful with them or anybody else; in fact, I consider myself to be one more natural resource. Now back to my argument. By declining housekeeping, some of these people will not conserve their jobs and their families depend on their small income (and tips). It saves money to Westin but certainly collaborates with unemployment of the poor; and I have good reasons to believe that conserving the environment is for the benefit of all: rich and poor.

And if they are talking about saving money (conserving the company’s green US Dollar bills), what other kinds of savings is the management of the Westin doing? Fewer or smaller bonuses for the CxOs? (Replace the x in the acronym by E, F, I, etc., and you get whom I’m referring to)? And what about reducing the number of high executives? Money-wise one of them makes for many, many, many housekeepers, and since they probably wouldn’t apply or need to apply for unemployment, the government, or the taxpayers, save money. But in addition, housekeepers probably use public transportation to go to work instead of their individual automobiles, and so the impact they produce on the environment is lower than the executives’. What about power consumption per capita? I bet housekeepers consume less kilowatts per person than the high executives, way less! And I can continue rambling on and on and on with this kind of comparisons…

If the Westin management really wants to make an environmental choice, they should look for other alternatives that are environmentally and socially better. And yes, they can keep my $5 gift card because I didn’t hang the card on the door. By the way, I don’t mean to scorn the Westin Hotel … only. This goes to any other hotel with a similar policy.

What I do choose every time I stay in a hotel for one or two nights is to hang my towels and not to place this card on the bed so that they do not change the towels or the bed linens unnecessarily. That saves water and detergent waste. Another way to help reduce waste is to take the remaining shampoo, conditioner, body lotion, etc. and finish them at home. Remnants are discarded otherwise. It may seem minuscule if I'm the only one doing this, but adding up all the guests it really means fewer little plastic bottles per day discarded. Hopefully, they recycle the bottles.

Now that I think of it, what do businesses really mean by green? People normally associate green with the environment and if that is so, businesses need to be more careful and stop invoking the environmental conscience of people for purposes that are not related to the environment.

Let’s call things by their name. By green, are they really implying the environment? Why not blue? Don’t we call our planet the "blue planet?" There is much more extension of blue in the environment of the planet than there is green. What about yellow? The yellowish desert is a rich ecosystem which we also need to care for. And what about all the other colors of nature? Our environment is beautifully multicolor, so let’s use the right words and the right names for the right things. Green is just one of the multitude of colors of nature and, as I have shown here, people’s association of green with the environment may be used to manipulate their conscience for other hidden purposes.