Hotels – Please clean up your acts & ditch the single use plastics x

Travelling round the UK with work for the past six months has been fabulous in so many ways. We’ve seen places never visited before and stayed in some great Airbnbs and hotels, ambled past stunning Scottish lochs and eaten oysters on windy beaches. Lots of good stuff. But one thing has really irked me. Not so much in smaller Airbnbs, where hosts generally provide large bottles of shampoos, conditioners and shower gels, but in the boutique hotels and the larger chains we’ve frequently slept in.

I’m talking about those things pictured above. The mini plastic bottles of cleansers and moisturisers lovingly positioned by hotel maids in bathrooms as luxury treats to make us feel special.

I hate them. I hate the way people use half a bottle and then leave them in the shower, ready to be thrown away, with half the product wasted and the plastic bottle going straight into landfill. I hate the way every single one is supposed to represent luxury and instead represents the careless waste which we all take for granted, and in this particular case which we’re supposed to delight in and be grateful for.

Seriously. Thousands, millions of these crappy little things are produced and thrown away daily by the hotel industry and absolute nothing is said about it. I mean, who even uses the moisturiser?? And the conditioner is always rubbish!

The one above in Brighton even came in a pointless, naff little bag with an even more ridiculous ribbon. They are literally littering our planet and we call them luxuries.

Please, hotel industry, can we have a re-think? Could you instead:

• Provide wall mounted re-fillable shower gel containers.Provide optional shampoo & conditioner if requested at reception, at a charge.Wrap any soap provided in paper wrappers, and make it palm oil free if possible.Ditch the moisturiser. No-one needs it. Enough with the unnecessary shower caps and sewing kits. It’s not 1964. 

We’ve all seen Blue Planet. We all know this plastic shit ends up in our seas and takes hundreds of years to decompose, if actually they ever do. Can’t you help us to enjoy our hotel bathrooms without the guilt of knowing that these silly single use treats could end up in the stomach of some whale or turtle somewhere?

Thanks x