The Marriott hotel group reduced its carbon intensity by 3.9 percent from 2010 to 2011, from 304.4 to 292.6 lbs of CO2 per square meter of facility, according to the company's latest corporate sustainability report.
But in 2007 - the company's baseline year - Marriott produced 287.7 lbs of CO2 per square meter, meaning that this metric has shown a net 1.7 percent increase since that time.
The company's absolute carbon emissions fell 0.4 percent year-on-year, from 2.81 million tons of CO2 equivalent in 2010 to 2.80 million tons CO2e in 2011. This metric has jumped almost 30 percent since 2007, when the company emitted 2.16 million tons CO2e.
In October 2011, the company was one of a group of 12 hotel chains, including Hilt0n and Hyatt, that announced plans to create a single methodology for calculating carbon footprints and emissions.
By year-end 2011, Marriott had 20 sites with renewable energy either installed or in the process of being installed. This puts the company halfway to meeting its goal of having 40 sites that incorporate renewable energy by 2017. Marriott sites use solar and wind energy for elements of hotel operations.
The hotel chain has 50 electric vehicle charging stations at 25 properties. In 2011, three electric vehicles were added to its corporate headquarters’ maintenance and security fleet, the report says.
Marriott's energy intensity fell 1.3 percent over the course of the 2011, from 335.4 to 331.2 kWh per square meter. Since 2007 this metric has fallen around 4 percent, from 345.2 kWh per square meter. The majority of the year-on-year reduction came from a 2 percent drop in purchased energy from 2010 to 2011.
The hotel chain says it was the first lodging company to join Constellation Energy's demand response initiative Project Vulcan. The system integrates energy load curtailment during peak demand periods with automated energy management systems, enabling hotels to track electricity usage. During times of high energy demand, hotels may choose to, for example, lower lighting in common areas or reduce air conditioning in hallways or unoccupied rooms.
In 2011, Marriott had 264 of it 362 eligible Marriott-managed hotels in the program, up from 141 in 2010. Last year the project saved the chain 1.3 million kWh of energy and raised $1.2 million in demand response revenues.
In 2011, the hotel chain also installed LED lighting retrofits in a number of European and Asian hotels and its corporate headquarters in Bethesda, Md.
Despite theses initiatives, a study of 46,000 US hotels by tech company Brighter Planet released in May ranked Marriott 75th out of 75 chains for energy efficiency.
The company has reduced its per room water consumption by 1.3 percent year on year, from 0.77 in 2010 to 0.76 in 2011. Since 2007 the company has reduced this metric by 12 percent.
The hotel chain has tapped Nalco, a water treatment and process improvement company, to save 450 million gallons of water from 2010 to 2012. Nalco’s monitoring equipment and water treatment chemistry has been deployed at 168 of Marriott's hotels worldwide. The systems help optimize the water treatment in the hotels’ chillers and cooling towers, the report says. Based on current program participation, the chain expects that savings will include at least 125 million gallons of water per year. The project is already saving 16 million gallons of water a year at Marriott’s Renaissance Mumbai Convention Centre Hotel, by using recycled water in the hotel’s cooling system, the report says.
From 2010 to 2011 Marriott decreased its pounds of landfill waste per occupied room by 4.7 percent in the Americas. Since 2009 it has reduced this metric by 10 percent.
In 2011, Marriott initiated 38 third-party waste audits aimed at better understanding its waste streams. As a result, the hotel chain's properties in the Americas diverted over 12,000 tons of waste from the landfill through recycling and food waste composting, the report says.
Last year the San Francisco Marriott Marquis achieved a 76 percent landfill diversion rate — 37 percent of waste was recycled and 39 percent was sent to a local food composting facility, the report says. The hotel won Marriott's annual Waste & Recycling Award for its efforts.
The report was compiled using the Global Reporting Initiative's G3.1 reporting guidelines. GRI has verified the report's content meeting application level "C."
Click through to view Environmental Leader's coverage of an earlier Marriott sustainability report from 2009.
