Those mini plastic toiletries in your hotel room are a big problem

Is there anything more wasteful than single-use plastics you didn’t ask for?

When you check into a hotel room, it comes pre-stocked with plastic mini toiletries, plastic cups (wrapped in more plastic), plastic straws and stirrers, and more. At the end of your stay, anything you opened goes straight into the trash — adding to the growing mountain of plastic waste we generate every day.

Hotels supply millions of plastic bottles, bags, cups and more to their guests each year. These plastics are single-serve, single-use and destined for the landfill.

That’s a problem when our country throws away enough plastic to fill the NFL’s largest football stadium to the brim every single day. All this plastic pollutes our communities, overflows our landfills, and can even break down into microplastics that end up in our air, water and food.

What can hotels do to cut back on plastic?

We’ve grown so accustomed to our plastic-dependent present that it can be hard to imagine what a hotel stay without plastic might look like.

But as more and more people embrace solutions to reduce plastic, we don’t have to look very far to find out. 

For example, Marriott has already taken some steps to reduce its plastic use — including phasing out most of its mini bottles. But with nearly 1.5 million hotel rooms around the world, there’s still so much more it can do to help take a bite out of our country’s plastic waste problem. 

Just as hotels like Marriott are replacing mini plastic bottles with larger, refillable dispensers, we can find more sustainable alternatives for all the single-use plastic we’re offered at lodging establishments.

We’re asking Marriott to help lead the hotel industry away from its dependence on plastic by measuring and disclosing its single-use plastic use and setting ambitious goals to reduce it. But Marriott won’t act unless it hears from people like you.

Tell Marriott: It’s time to move beyond single-use plastic.