Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a ban on those small plastic bottles for hotel guests that contain shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, moisturizer and other personal care items.
They’re convenient, particularly for airline passengers who, since 2006, haven’t been allowed to carry on containers of liquids any larger than 3.4 ounces and so often leave their own products at home. And they’re fun to collect.
But they’re also a waste. They’re too difficult to clean to make them easily recyclable, so they end up in landfills in enormous quantities — a half-billion miniature containers a year in California alone, according to legislators’ estimates behind the law.
Replacing them with large, tamper-resistant pump dispensers mounted on shower walls is a move toward “safeguarding our environment and mitigating plastic waste and waterway pollution,” in the words of the legislative sponsor of a nearly identical prohibition introduced last month in the state of New York.
The California ban won’t go into effect until 2023 for hotels with more than 50 rooms and 2024 for smaller facilities, and it calls for fines of up to $2,000 for repeat violators. The hospitality industry hasn’t mounted any organized objections, and in fact may end up voluntarily beating the deadline in California and around the world.
Last year, the Walt Disney Co. got rid of tiny toiletries at its resort hotels and on its cruise ships. In July, InterContinental Hotels Group — which includes Crowne Plazas and Holiday Inns — announced a similar phaseout. Marriott International, which started swapping big bottles for little bottles in some of its more than 7,000 international hotels in early 2018, committed in August to a full conversion by the end of 2020.
It looks as though we’re going to see an end to the ever-escalating hotel bathroom amenities wars, whether or not other states decide to follow California’s lead.
The change will demand a small emotional adjustment from us. I encountered pump bottles mounted on the wall at one of Marriott’s SpringHill Suites properties this year, and they didn’t feel nearly as luxurious to me as the array of single-use products by the sink to which I’m accustomed when traveling.
But a sensation of virtue more than made up for the disappointment. Using the pumps provided one of those “no plastic straw for me, thanks, I’m saving the planet” moments, leaving me feeling cleansed both within and without.
And yeah, I know, it’s a green gesture even smaller than the rapidly vanishing micro bottles. The pump dispensers have a carbon footprint of their own and are often not reused or recycled.
In his online essay “Removing mini-shampoos from hotel rooms won’t save the environment,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering professor Yossi Sheffi argued that “even if replacing miniature toiletries does reduce waste somewhat … . the move to bulk products will barely put a dent in the plastic waste that now clogs the planet’s rivers and oceans.”
Sheffi called the switchover “more of a PR exercise” and “another feel-good initiative which helps avoid the move to more serious actions that can actually make a difference.”
The PR is good, though. Yes, tiny toiletries make up just a fraction of 1% of the some 250 million tons of plastic waste generated each year according to the World Bank, and eliminating them won’t do much if anything to reverse the effects of global climate change.
But awareness prompted by their disappearance will “help change the way people think about single-use plastics in general,” said Julie Tighe president of the New York League of Conservation Voter. “We need to be doing everything we can, big and small, to put people in a different mindset about our disposable culture.”
Collect the little shampoo bottles while you can. Someday you can show them to your grandchildren, who will never believe we were once so wasteful.
Eric Zorn is an op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
