The hospitality and tourism sector accounts for approximately 10% of global GDP and supports more than 330 million jobs worldwide. With that scale comes significant impact on energy, water, materials, biodiversity, and local resources.
Recently, we convened a panel discussion with The Data Lab, bringing together sustainability practitioners from across the sector—from small regenerative startups to global hotel chains. Some uncomfortable truths emerged about waste data in hospitality, and why good intentions alone aren’t enough.
The sector wants to do the right thing. But fragmented data makes it nearly impossible to know if they actually are.
The Challenge: Good Intentions Meet Messy Reality
Amber Pledge, co-founder of Kabn—an award-winning regenerative hospitality brand in Scotland—captures the fundamental tension. Her luxury off-grid cabins track solar power usage, publish sustainability initiatives transparently, and hold third-party certifications from Green Tourism and 1% for the Planet.
But she’s candid about the difficulties. “Good intentions aren’t enough,” she explains. “You need data to make decisions that are truly responsible and also to back them up.”
The challenge isn’t just measurement. It’s verification. For small businesses, the cost of certification is high. More confusing is navigating the “plethora of different options” for proving sustainability claims. Some certifications feel disingenuous—pay a fee, plant some trees, claim carbon neutrality. Others require genuine operational changes but lack industry recognition.
Enterprise Scale: Where Data Complexity Multiplies
If small operators struggle with verification, enterprise-scale hospitality faces a different beast entirely: systemic data fragmentation.
Dr Mercedes Hunt, Director of Energy & Sustainability at Marriott International, describes the reality of managing waste data across thousands of global properties. Marriott wanted a detailed understanding of waste footprints—not just material types and tonnage, but where waste actually goes and its final fate.
This is where things get interesting. And complicated.
Hunt describes what she calls “the guy problem.” At nearly every Marriott property she visits, local teams tell her the same thing: “I’ve got a guy who comes and takes our pallets” or “I’ve got a guy who collects our bottles and cans.”
These informal diversion efforts happen constantly. Housekeepers take bottles and cans for recycling. Local people sort through waste after it leaves properties, pulling out materials for reuse. Properties have arrangements with farmers for food waste—feeding chickens, pigs, or carp, depending on the region.
None of this shows up in formal waste data.
“There are so many of these stories,” Hunt notes. “But we’re not collecting the data. It’s just the right thing to do.” The result? Companies know what waste goes to official contractors and landfills, but they can’t see what gets diverted before formal collection even begins.
The Hidden Stories in Waste Data
When Marriott began systematically collecting detailed waste data across properties, unexpected patterns emerged.
Properties doing “incredible things” became visible—initiatives that couldn’t be seen through regular data collection. Cigarette butts are being diverted. Oyster shells are being processed. The variety of local circular economy arrangements that properties had developed independently, each adapted to their specific context.
“Things we never expected have come out of this data,” Hunt explains. “Discoveries of properties internationally that are doing incredible things that we could not see through our regular data collection.”
The most interesting and effective practices happen at ground level, driven by local relationships and informal arrangements. But without systematic data collection, these innovations remain invisible. Companies can’t learn from them, replicate them, or report on them accurately.
Islands, Context, and the Limits of Universal Solutions
Dr. Angelo Sciacca, Senior Research Fellow at IDDRI and Edinburgh Napier University, brings a perspective from small island tourism destinations. His work on circular economy in island contexts reveals an important lesson: sustainability solutions are highly contextual.
Small islands often excel at what he calls “traditional circularity”—informal systems of reuse and resource management developed out of necessity. Remote locations and seasonal tourism create natural incentives for these practices. But they also create barriers to implementing sophisticated waste processing technologies, since seasonal demand means unreliable material flows.
“Circular economy is highly contextual,” Sciacca emphasises. “We have the big framework and then okay, how does it apply to these particular territories?”
Global frameworks meet local realities everywhere in hospitality. A waste management approach that works in urban Edinburgh won’t translate to remote Hebridean islands. What’s feasible for a flagship London property may be impossible for franchised properties in developing markets.
The Franchise Problem: Data Without Control
Robert McKinnon, former CEO of Outer Hebrides Tourism, highlights another data challenge: franchise models.
Many hospitality brands operate through franchises or management contracts. The brand sets sustainability standards and reporting requirements, but often has limited access to actual operational data. Local operators may lack systems to collect detailed waste information, or they may simply be focused on immediate operational needs rather than corporate reporting requirements.
Corporate teams need data for compliance and investor reporting, but they’re dependent on individual properties to collect and share it. Without strong systems and incentives, data quality varies wildly.
What Makes Waste Data Actually Useful
The conversation reveals what separates performative sustainability from genuine progress.
Tonnage alone tells you almost nothing. Fifty tons of waste—but what materials? Where did they go? What happened to them after collection? Were they genuinely recycled, or did contamination send them to the local landfill anyway?
Visibility matters across the entire value chain. The most interesting waste management happens in informal arrangements—the “guys” who take materials, local partnerships, housekeepers diverting bottles. Without capturing this, companies miss both genuine impact and opportunities for improvement.
Waste data in hospitality comes from invoices, contractor spreadsheets, local reports, informal arrangements, and direct observation. Each property operates differently. Standardising this into comparable, auditable data requires systematic collection and verification.
When data reveals that a property in South Africa has an innovative approach to food waste, that insight becomes valuable only if other properties can learn from it. This requires documented practices, measurable outcomes, and systems to share knowledge.
Beyond Measurement: Using Data to Drive Decisions
Hunt’s description of working with Resordinate on waste data collection illustrates what’s possible when enterprises invest in systematic data infrastructure.
By collecting detailed transaction-level data across properties and verifying material destinations through multiple sources—facility locations, operator licenses, industry data—companies can finally see their complete waste footprint.
This visibility enables strategic decisions. Where can you reduce waste at source? Which contractors are genuinely delivering on recycling claims? Where are cost savings opportunities? What practices from high-performing properties could be replicated elsewhere?
More importantly, it creates data that stands up to scrutiny. When reporting to assurers, investors, or regulators, you need documented verification of claims, not estimates based on incomplete information.
The Path Forward: Systematic Data Infrastructure
The hospitality sector doesn’t lack intention. Small operators like Kabn invest heavily in genuine practices despite tight margins. Enterprise brands like Marriott set ambitious targets and dedicate serious resources to sustainability teams.
What’s missing is infrastructure for trustworthy data.
As Hunt notes: “The devil’s in the detail.” Those details live in contractor systems, informal diversion arrangements, local partnerships, and countless operational decisions made daily across thousands of properties.
Capturing these details, standardising them into comparable data, verifying their accuracy, and making them actionable for decision-making—that’s the work that transforms sustainability from aspiration into measurable progress.
For sustainability professionals in hospitality managing complex, multi-site operations, better data isn’t optional anymore. Stakeholders now require complete, verified visibility into what’s really happening with your waste. The question is whether your current infrastructure can actually deliver it.
About the panel discussion: This article draws on insights from “Making Room for Sustainability in Hospitality and Tourism,” a recent Data Lab webinar. The panel brought together leaders working across different scales and contexts in hospitality sustainability to discuss challenges and opportunities in measurement and data.