Good green practices, ideal marketing tool

351 hotels sign up with the project:

Indunil Hewage

EU funded SWITCH ASIA Greening Sri Lanka Hotels Project has now successfully completed three years and was now moving in to its final year of operations.

Main of objective of the target is to enhance the environmental performance of the Sri Lanka hotels through improvement of energy, water and waste management systems. The project has helped local hotel business in a number of ways, thereby reducing cost of operations and increasing their market acceptance as green hotels with low carbon foot prints.

"A total number of 351 hotels have signed up with the project and these improvements will contribute towards conservation of natural resources and thereby help the targeted hotel sector SMEs and other hospitality industrialists to reduce operating costs substantially, improve competitiveness and market acceptance, ensuring long-term sustainability of the Sri Lankan Tourism industry," CCC Solutions (Pvt) Limited Managing Director/CEO Prema Cooray said.

"Sri Lankan hotels should further improve their greening practices thereby adopting good energy management initiatives, particularly in the areas of lighting and solar water heating.

A large number of hotels have managed to implement greener measures across 80% of operations. However, the water management is somewhat lagging, waste management also needs to be improved.

Most Sri Lankan hotels are thus now becoming aware, that adopting good green practices was not only vital for operational cost management and profitability enhancement, but also as a good marketing tool.

The SWITCH ASIA programme conducts energy audits and showed hoteliers numerous ways by which they could reduce their energy consumption," Senior Environmental Engineer Prof. Niranjanie Rathnayake said.