Digital Technologies And Environmental Impact

The digital revolution touches all aspects of our human and physical world in many ways. Whether you read some news, comment friend’s new post, watch a film or buy insurance. It is easy to take for granted this digital ecosystem, and it is hard to imagine a time before it. 

IT innovation, digitization, digitalization, allow us to cut down on our energy usage. Today it’s a fact that our society has moved to a new era. We look at emails instead of regular mail; we make remote video calls instead of flying to meetings with colleagues, or we watch online broadcasting of music and films instead of participating in events and so on.

Techno Boom

Our lives got more comfortable in all ways, but it also made an enormous negative impact on our environment. Deforestation, rising sea levels, higher carbon dioxide levels, and plastic bottles glutting landfills and oceans, — the issue of sustainability has become a hot topic. 

It has become a reason why more and more companies around the world have started to reduce their environmental impact. Xerox is a good case in point. The company is investing to help the industry go green and introducing innovative technologies to help organizations walk the paperless path. Now documents can be scanned directly to cloud services such as Google Drive, iCloud, and Microsoft Office 365 for storage and collaboration. Can you imagine the quantum of paper saved if an average law firm could go digital? A recent survey of law firms found that each attorney generates up to 100,000 sheets per year. Assuming a 2,000-hour work year, that's 50 pages an hour. Almost a sheet a minute. Enough paper laid end-to-end to wrap around the US Supreme Court Building 66 times.

Another great example is DocuSign — a naturally forest-friendly company, helping hundreds of millions of people around the world to replace over 20 billion sheets of paper with an eco-friendly digital process. Since 2003 they’ve saved over 2.5 million trees and the 2 million gallons of water needed to make the 20 billion sheets of paper. And because that paper was not made, our planet was spared 1.6 million metric tons (MMmt) of additional CO2. As a comparison, in 2018, emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by the U.S. electric power sector were 1.1 MMmt.

Hotels Going Green

Even though the hospitality industry is not among the leaders in terms of negative impact on the environment; still hotels contribute to its pollution.

For example, due to the energy and water consumption, the use of disposable goods (such as plastic and paper), and chemical products during cleaning, etc.,

To cope with those issues, more hotels have changed their practices of non-ecological material usage. It benefits not only the environment but also the hotel sector. By promoting the environmental practices, they incorporate into their business, hotels receiving great positive publicity and standing to save money too. In fact, hotels benefit significantly from the recent push for all business sectors towards "Go Green."

While Marriott International and other large chains have promised to eliminate items that never fully decompose, like plastic straws, there are smaller chains that are keeping up the pace. For example, Hostelling International USA became the first hostel company in the world to implement “smart showers” that limit showering time to 7 minutes. And a number of such “go green” hotels grow every year around the world.

The HKeeper Contribution To The Go Green Policy

An alternative approach to the conservation of natural resources is to create software that reduces their consumption, as well as work without previously used materials such as paper. The HKeeper is an example of such software.

HKeeper not only reduces the use of material resources and operating costs at the hotel by up to 30% but also eliminates the need for paper in its daily operations and saves trees for future generations.

What does it mean in practice?

According to the statistics, in the United States, there are about 5 million hotel rooms. The average hotel uses one sheet of A4 paper to provide various services or assignments for each room per day. That gives 1,825,000,000 sheets of paper per year, and this is a significant amount. 

If we do a little Google research, we will find out that 6820 sheets of paper produced from a single tree. It means that approximately 268,000 trees are chopped down for the hotel industry’s needs in the US annually.

For better understanding, New-York Central Park is home to approximately 18,000 trees. Add here some elementary math, and you’ll get 15 Central Parks for the US hotel industry’s usage for one year. 

We need to eliminate the excessive use of paper and try to reduce paper waste in the hotel industry.  Don't you think it's time to start using HKeeper or similar software in your hotels?