Discover the Blue Standard
Oceanic Global partnered with Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok (MO BKK) to eliminate single-use plastics throughout the location over a two-year period, in accordance with the brand’s ambitious sustainability KPIs.
In November, 2020 the MO BKK location earned the 2-Star Blue Seal and became a Blue Verified business for their success in eliminating single-use plastics, supporting local food supply chains, and working with their vendors to find sustainable solutions.
Featured Solutions
Mandarin Oriental Bangkok removed over 50 types of single-use plastic items from their operations, featuring the solutions below:
Bathroom Amenities: Maintaining their luxury hotel status by offering high-quality services, MO BKK found sustainable solutions including aluminum wet amenities, and wooden, bamboo, and cloth dry amenities.
Bakery Takeaway: The Mandarin Oriental Bakery is iconic to the brand, especially their well-loved macaroons. The team replaced single-use plastic packaging by finding bulk solutions like glass jars, eliminating unnecessary plastic like bag liners, and working closely with their supplier to redesign other packaging and boxes.
Shopping Bags: Single-use plastic bags in the gift shop were replaced with paper bags and a 5 baht fee was added to disincentivize their use.
Major Challenges Overcome
Infrastructure: Considering local waste management infrastructure is always a priority and a challenge, in this case due to limited available waste management, all waste is sorted on-site and speciality waste streams are collected by specific waste haulers. This requires significant staff training and relies on employee engagement for successful implementation. A large and multinational hospitality brand like Mandarin Oriental has high employee turnover rate, so integrating employee training into the staff onboarding process is necessary to ensure the successful maintenance of sustainability initiatives.
Redesigning Markets: The zero waste movement is new and growing in local markets in Southeast Asia, so the team had to find creative solutions for approved sustainable products: negotiating with their suppliers, redesigning products, refusing and sending back single-use plastic packaging, and beyond to meet their sustainability goals.
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