At RIU Hotels & Resorts, we work day by day to reduce the amount of waste our activity generates as far as possible and manage it responsibly.
This commitment translates into several measures, such as our Ecological Breakfast and treatment of hazardous waste such as printer toner, faxes, photocopiers and the vegetable oil used in our kitchens.

1. Ecological Breakfast

Kitchens and dining rooms are some of the main sources of waste in hotels. Breakfast stands out among all the meals because of the large amount of trash that individual portions of jam, honey, yogurt and butter generate. This made us reflect and we set out to replace small, one-portion packages with bulk products in 1997.

The launch of this project has avoided the use of almost 46 million individual portion packages during 2007 and an estimated 295 million in all RIU hotels from January 2000 to December 2007.

Considering RIU's substantial expansion in recent years, we have calculated that approximately 4,731 tonnes of plastic trash from these individual packages has been avoided throughout the Group between 2000 and 2007.

As an example, almost 5,000 Volkswagen Transporter vans, one of the largest and most popular models in the commercial vehicle range, would be needed to transport all that waste. If all these vans were placed one behind the other, they would cover a distance of more than 24.5 kilometres.

Another example is the INE's most recent Waste Collection and Treatment survey (Spain's National Institute of Statistics), which contains data from 2006. That year, Ecological Breakfasts avoided generating 705 tonnes of package waste, the equivalent to the amount recycled by almost 38,000 Spaniards, according to data from the INE.

The use of bulk product entails another important savings: the plastic garbage bags that used to be needed to remove all those packages!

In 2000 alone, the use of approximately 7 million garbage bags was avoided. In other terms, the Ecological Breakfast avoided the use of 105 tonnes of garbage across the RIU Group that year. Furthermore, an estimated 11.5 million garbage bags were saved in 2007 and almost 74 million garbage bags, the equivalent of 1,109 tons of bags, were saved from 2000 to 2007 (inclusive).

2. Managing highly contaminating or hazardous waste

1- Photocopiers and printer toner

A hazardous waste manager is in charge of collecting printer toner and photocopiers, etc., at RIU offices.

2- Used vegetable oil

The vegetable oil used in RIU hotel kitchens in the Balearics, Andalusia, the Canaries and Aruba is collected by a waste management firm authorised by local authorities.
This management firm drops off suitable, certified containers to store the oils and periodically collects and delivers a voucher receipt to the hotel management that accredits proper collection.