Living in a Balinese community is ruled by the local philosophy called the “gotong royong” which means joint responsibility and mutual cooperation. Responding to today’s challenges, Bali Hotels Association (BHA) is inspired by these living principles and the benefit of supporting the local communities and its people. Numerous programmes are developed and implemented to empower individuals and groups providing them with the skills and knowledge they need to initiate and drive change in their life and communities.
BHA collaboratively works with other social institutions and initiates programmes on an ad-hoc basis to address short- and long-term concerns in Bali.
Recently, in partnership with Diversey, BHA launched the PlasticShreds program. PlasticShreds is a program where single-use plastic wastes (such as mineral water or soda bottles, used plastic containers) are shredded into plastic chips, which are then used as gravel replacement in the building of horizontal structures such as basketball or badminton courts, village roads, pavements or just to fill up potholes in roads. A badminton court can “entomb” up to 72,000 discarded empty 1L water bottles, which is a much better option that to discard these plastic bottles waste into a landfill or for these bottles to end up in rivers or oceans.
The PlasticShreds demonstration was conducted at The Trans Resort Bali at Seminyak. Prior to the demo session, various BHA member hotels had collected single-use plastic bottles waste amounting to 15 large trash bags. The bottles were then chipped using the PlasticShreds machine. The chips would be used as gravel replacement to construct a pavement in one of the BHA hotels as a demonstration to showcase how easy it is to transform waste plastic into something useful.
Alexander Jovanovic, Director Development – Hotel & Resort of CT Corp and General Manager of The Trans Resort Bali said, “We are always finding ways to reduce impact to the environment in Bali, and reducing the impact of single-use plastic waste is the next step that our hotels will undertake to contribute to sustainable tourism in Bali.”
Using plastic chips as replacement for gravel in construction of horizontal structures had been successfully piloted earlier in Tekir Village, Malaysia, with single-use plastic water bottles waste provided by the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Melaka. The chips were added to the cement/sand mixture and used to build pavements in the village. Test results of the resultant concrete mix, including density, stability, flow, stiffness and resilient modulus, all demonstrated that the plastic chips were as good as gravel to be used in the construction of horizontal structures such as roads or badminton courts.
Carey Osborne, General Manager of DoubleTree Hilton Hotel Melaka said, “While we have been striving to reduce single-use plastic waste in our operations, it is inevitable that we will still have some plastic waste generated. Thus we are happy that we have a way to divert these plastic waste from landfill or incineration, and repurposing these plastic waste as construction material to build communal areas such as basketball or badminton courts in nearby villages.”
According to Stefan Phang, Global Director for Sustainability & Creating Shared Value at Diversey, “PlasticShreds is the latest Diversey program that BHA has embraced. Previously Diversey and BHA had worked together to run Soap For Hope, which reprocess used hotel guests soaps into new soap bars, and Linens For Life, which repurposes end-of-life hotel linen into new products such as face masks, school uniforms for children, kitchen aprons, tote bags and others.
These programmes not only protect the environment by diverting tons of hotel discards from landfills, incinerators and oceans, but also help local communities by enhancing their livelihoods as well as providing them items that protect them such as soaps and face masks. We are very happy that BHA is a strong partner with us in our programmes. We are also very grateful to Carey and the DoubleTree Melaka team for believing in PlasticShreds and to jointly conduct the pilot in Tekir. The lessons learnt in Tekir will be applied in Bali, as well in launches in other cities in the future.”
Kevin Girard, General Manager of Conrad Bali and Chairman of BHA Sustainability Committee added, “As Bali reopens to international travel, we need to ensure that we have a mechanism in place to reduce and repurpose plastic waste that will inevitably increase with increased travel. We are looking forward to utilizing the PlasticShreds program to help us achieve these goals.”
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