Studying Sustainability Practices in the Singaporean Hotel Industry

Recently, a group of four MBA students from SFU's Beedie School of Business (including myself) undertook a month-long trip to Singapore to complete a survey on green practices in that country's economically important hotel sector. The trip was an incredible exposure to Asia, and a great way to put our MBA skils to work.

A bit of background on sustainability....

Basically, the term "CSR," corporate social responsibility, came into vogue in recent decades, and is still a very important concept for businesses to come to terms with. To some extent, it is a reaction of the corporate community to some of the major environmental and political counter-culture of recent years (and specific watershed events such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which helped launch sustainability organizations like Ceres, for example). Noted chicago school economist, Milton Freidman perhaps best expressed the viewpoint of an older generation of business leaders when he described the social responsibility of business as 'doing business' (and nothing else). New corporate leaders began to understand that while formally accountable to shareholders, they needed a broad social and environmental "license to operate" as well. To safeguard this, they tended to invest heavily in the public relations machinery of their business, ensuring that they were broadly interpreted as responsible, even if their specific practices were less so. The limitations of this framework became clear, however ,with terms like 'green-washing' being leveled at firms which were seen as duplicitious - e.g. spending more money on marketing their green-ness than really making real changes (interestingly, the term, coined by Jay Westerveld in a 1986 essay - was related to a New York hotel's towel & linen reuse program)

Sustainability, another big concept, can be defined in many ways. Perhaps the simplest definition involves operating a business in such a way that it could continue indefinitely; not consuming limmited resources, or impacting the physical environment negatively such that future generations would be deprived of their livelyhoods.  

The project, funded by Contact Singapore, and Simon Fraser University, focussed specifically on specific practices such as:

* Use of LED lighting instead of conventional incandescent lighting

* Water reduction systems such as low-flush, low litre-per-flush toilets

* Presence of environmental policies, green teams and other policy / organizational features

The research tool (survey) also used questions from prior surveys conducted in other regions of the world (New Zealand, China, Jordan, Malaysia, USA, Poland, Sweden, etc) in order to shed some light on the relative standing of Singaporean hotels compared to international peers. 

Along the way, I had the opportunity to meet some amazing sustainability & engineering professionals in these hotels, who completely impressed our team with their expertise, professionalism and sincere dedication to their work. Its always a treat to go into a meeting with an engineer, or operations manager, only to discover that they cannot stop talking about their trade and the various initiatives they are pursuing to make specific changes happen. 

A blog on our experiences can be found at : http://sfumbasinsingapore.blogspot.com/

 

 

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