Are Irish hotels as green as we think they are?

Imagine the scene: On a recent weekend way, I saw the inevitable sign in the bathroom. “Save our planet,” it beseeched. “Every day, millions of gallons of water are used to wash towels that have only been used once.”

No washing machine was involved, but I could still see the spin here. Especially when I had to dispense my shower gel from a tiny plastic bottle. And in the bar, when my passion fruit martini came served with a plastic straw, well…

It’s a common situation, agrees Maurice Bergin, an environmental consultant in the hospitality sector and managing director of greenhospitality.ie, the industry’s largest certification programme. “The towel message is the most abused environmental comment in the world — it’s a good example of how to get it incredibly wrong while trying to do good,” he says.

“The customer isn’t stupid. They know if they hang up the towel, hotels don’t wash it and save money. The message shouldn’t be ‘save the planet’ because you won’t. It should be, ‘help us to do our bit’. And the smart hotels say ‘if you hang up your towel, we’ll donate money to a local environmental programme’.”

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“Greenwashing” — that is, overstating often tokenistic initiatives to give a misleading impression of a brand’s eco credentials — is rife in the hospitality sector as more consumers consider it when making decisions about their travels, whether home or abroad.

Another example is when an Irish hotel boasts only about using renewable energy — a valid but easy switch — or sending zero waste to landfill. “That’s interesting because very specifically in Ireland, no commercial waste is legally allowed go to landfill anyway — we incinerate it,” says Bergin. “It sounds good, but that could still mean 100 per cent of the waste they produce is being burnt instead of separated, recycled and reused.”

Which begs the question: how do we as responsible travellers really know if a hotel is meaningful in its green commitment?

The easiest way to verify a hotel’s green credibility is by looking at their website, which should outline the steps they’re taking in detail. If they’ve made or planned big changes to their heating systems to make them energy-efficient, that’s a clear indication of commitment because that type of investment often only has long-term gains.

“Ultimately, if I check the website and there’s no quantification in there, then I know it’s only talk,” Bergin says. “Even if they say ‘we’re committed to reducing our carbon footprint by 50 per cent by 2030′, my question is what actions are you actually going to put in place to make that happen? In all of this, the devil [is] in the detail.”

Inevitably, such communication favours larger companies — a family-run B&B may not have the means to update their website regularly, let alone quantify their commitment. But it at least helps to highlight ones that are eco-conscious.

Checking for a hotel’s green certifications and awards is another way of making sure there’s meaningful change. That said, across all industries, companies can use these as another greenwashing ploy — the accusations against the Marine Stewardship Council’s blue tick scheme exposed in the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy are still fresh in our minds. But Bergin insists greenhospitality.ie is robust. As an example, if a company wants to become carbon neutral, part of their programme involves planting native Irish woodland trees in Ireland. “I’m a firm believer that you can’t just buy yourself out of your carbon responsibility,” he says. “If you’re emitting in Ireland, then plant the trees in Ireland, while also giving carbon support to a developing economy.”

As a whole, we’re performing reasonably well. In Euromonitor International’s latest Sustainable Travel Index Rankings, Ireland ranks 15th out of 99 countries, performing better than Germany, Denmark, Spain and the United Kingdom, among others. “And I believe that the Irish hotel sector has one of the best penetrations of environmental certification and engagement, with around 15-20 per cent of hotels actively engaged,” Bergin says.

One such hotel is Ashford Castle in Co Mayo, which is often held as an example of good eco responsibility, helped by its five-star status and investment from its parent company since 2013, Red Carnation Hotels. Ailish Keane, Ashford Castle’s purchasing manager, says: “You can see straight away when you come into the hotel that we care about the locality and the estate we’re looking after. When you arrive, you can see we’ve restored an 800-year-old castle, and then you’re driving through [a] geo-certified golf course. You can see we’ve kept the roughage with the native plants and we keep trees there for biodiversity.”

Initiatives include no single-use plastics by the end of this year, rewilding a fifth of the 350-acre estate and capturing rain water across the estate to reuse. They also monitor energy consumption, waste generation and water use to ensure it’s going the right way.

Helen Gibbons, another team member, says: “We don’t ever feel like we’re greenwashing. We track all of our progress through diligent programming, which is externally audited, and we have the awards and the certification to back everything up.”

Of course there are many other hotels doing great stuff beyond reusing towels. The Wren Urban Nest puts its message front and centre of its website, declaring itself “Dublin’s most sustainable place to stay”, thanks to calls such as using an advanced heating and cooling system to stay energy efficient, placing filtered water taps on every floor, running a zero-waste kitchen and planting a rooftop garden to help biodiversity.

In Killarney, the Black Sheep Hostel has a 70 per cent target of buying local, including upcycling furniture. They offer a free hot drink for guests that arrive on bikes, grow their own vegetables and herbs, and keep chickens mainly fed on the hostel’s food waste. Fundamental actions like these are at the core of the changes we need to see if we want to reduce our impact in a meaningful way.

“We tend to get hung up on plastic and plastic is important, but climate change is more important,” says Bergin. “It’s just that the complexity of breaking it down into every impact we have — as consumers, as business owners, as people, as travellers — is incredibly difficult. We all know we need to do better, but it’s an enormous task.”