Sealed Air India organises customer meet
Sealed Air held its Customer Meet on April 11, at the Optus Sarovar hotel in Gurgaon which saw many leading players in the industry share ideas through panel discussions, presentations, and networking on a large variety of topics. It was well attended by top end users from segments such as laundry, surface cleaning, washrooms, and manufacturing.
The panel members for the first discussion – Sustainability in Housekeeping – were Shipra Nair, Corporate Housekeeper-Fortune Park Hotels Ltd; Avinash Garg, Hospitality Consultant; Meenu Tognatta, Executive Housekeeper-ITC projects; Niranjan Khatri, General Manager-WelcomEnviron Initiatives and Ajay Dhar, Chief Engineer-WelcomHotel Sheraton. The discussion was moderated by Kevin, Professor at University of Toronto.
On the need to be conscious about sustainability, Shipra spoke about being conscious ‘right from cradle to graveyard’ of any product and gave examples of using sachets which are easy to transport instead of cans for easy end- of -use disposal, using i-cloud computing instead of using large computer servers which need to be kept in an air- conditioned space, and maybe donating linen to NGO’s after its life is over instead of recycling. She suggested a ‘take-back program’, whereby machine parts are reused, or put to some use, so that they do not go directly into the junk yard. Meenu asked the audience to think about using chemicals in such a way that these could go back into the environment and cause no further problems.
From the Engineering point of view, Ajay Dhar said that the main focus was on energy and water consumption. Speaking on 3R, Avinash stressed upon the awareness needed on how much water and energy was used. Putting the Indian hospitality industry in the global perspective, Khatri said we had some catching up to do.
Moving to the next point as to what drives sustainability in housekeeping, Meenu said that it depended on the individual and that the key drivers should be from the top down all the way to the grassroots level and then could work in reverse as well. Shipra added that the key drivers for her were the 3 P’s – Profit, People and Planet. The customers are globally travelled and so they expect no less in terms of quality of service and caring for the environment.
