2 days Ago By TEMALESI VONO
In a commitment to environmental protection and sustainability, the five-star Shangri-La Yanuca Island resort has introduced eco-friendly alternatives in its hotel rooms. The resort now offers glass bottles, paper cutlery, and canvas laundry bags, replacing plastic items to reduce environmental impact and promote greener hospitality practices. Resort’s sales director Marsha Eyre says they would be introducing glass bottles in their rooms, and not plastic, after the construction of their own bottling plant on the hotel’s premises which would be done this year.
“This is one of the projects for this year, we are going to open a new bottling plant, just imagine how much we can save in terms of bottles,” said Ms Eyre. “Another project that we hope to complete by this year is the little amenity bottles in the rooms, those are our plastics. “We plan to put them into recyclable bigger plastics as well, so that’s planned to be all set up by February or March, again saving on plastic.
“The resort has a policy on all single-use plastics, so you’ll find whereas before you had a lot of packaging and plastics and things like that. “Now, straws are all paper, no plastics, cutlery, takeaway bags, those things have been implemented already from two years ago.” She said laundry bags in each room had been changed to canvas, instead of synthetic ones, along with their marine education centre where they focus on educating children on school visits on the importance of keeping the environment, and the coral reefs clean.
“We bring in almost 1500 children throughout the year from different local schools around Viti Levu where they come in and learn about the importance of the coral reef, especially since we are located here on the coral coast,” she said. “We encourage students to come in, build fish houses, coral planting, and we have a manager that manages all that with her team on the island. “Apart from that, we do mangrove planting as well.
“There’s a lot of mangroves that we’ve planted from throughout these past ten years, and we continue to encourage that to the children and our staff.”.
