Our progress towards a circular economy in 2021

These are just a couple of highlights of our comprehensive work on moving towards a circular economy, view the rest in our 2021 Year in Review.

With the gradual creation of the 3Rs teams in each of our hotels and resorts, we will centralize waste management from all areas of the hotel under one specific and specialized group of individuals. The department is responsible for collecting, measuring and understanding waste to identify the changes needed to reduce it gradually. Teams will be formed by hotel staff and their key function is to support a system of continuous improvement in the reduction, reuse and recycling of waste by analyzing the waste generated in each area. The observations and recommendations will be shared continuously with all our hotel’s departments. This team is critical in our work towards becoming waste-free by 2025.

At Iberostar, tackling food waste means having a system that can allow us to measure and categorize what we are throwing away. While that seems simple at first, when you bring it to the scale of an industrial kitchen with thousands of chefs worldwide as part of our incredible gastronomic team, we depend on technology. Specifically, we’re proud to be working with Winnow Solutions, a company based out of the UK that creates an AI-enabled tool that allows kitchens to automatically track food waste. Specifically, their system takes photos of wasted food as it is thrown away and uses the images to train and recognize what’s been thrown away. Over time, the system learns the habits of our kitchens and allows the data to be captured nearly automatically, increasing data accuracy and ease of use.

Quotes from Marc Zornes, Co-founder and CEO of Winnow Solutions:

“Iberostar has set out a clear and ambitious vision to become waste-free by 2025, and I am delighted to be able to support them on this journey through Winnow. I hope this initiative by Iberostar will spur action across the sector, which is needed if we are to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of halving food waste worldwide by 2030.”

“In the future I believe every commercial kitchen will be fitted with an AI device to measure food waste and maximize productivity. In doing so we will solve the problem of avoidable food waste forever and meet the Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 to halve food waste worldwide.”

We’re proud to announce that Iberostar commits to reducing its energy consumption per stay by 35% relative to a 2019 baseline by 2030. Still the same great product, but more efficient energy use to achieve it! To do so, we have identified four key levers to achieve this, each with its own annual targets: