If you’re like GAN, within five minutes of checking into any hotel room, you’ve exploited all of its natural resources. The TV is on, expensive jars of peanuts have been cracked open, the trouser press is already on its third set of suit pants, etc. That’s the joy of hotels; you can live your life with operational impunity, knowing that you’ve paid someone else to find the tossed-aside remote control, clean up the peanut debris and put out the electrical fire that the fire crew believe started from an overheated trouser press.
Hotels know this.
And so it’s nice that they at least try and reign in our most excessive instincts. Just in case we were considering using three different-sized towels just to have a shave, they have those little green signs: “SAVE OUR PLANET. Every day, millions of gallons of water are wasted washing towels that have only been used once. A towel on the rack means ‘I will use again’. A towel on the floor means ‘Please replace’.”
We at GAN are all for this, not least because instead of draping it over the in-room DVD player or hanging it from the light fitting, actually deciding to put a towel back on the rack makes us feel as though we are helping the world on an ‘organising Live Aid’ scale. “Yes,” we think, as we place a slightly damp towel in its right, civilised place, “We have helped someone here today.”
Of course, most guests of hotels have travelled thousands of miles to get there on all manner of carbon-spewing transport, leave all the lights on in their rooms the whole time and are probably there in the first place for a meeting to plan turning the world’s parks into Grand Prix motor racing venues and branches of Nandos. So while we applaud the sentiment, we’re just not sure that reusing our facecloth is actually making us the ecological Titans we like to pretend we are.
(Image via Creative Commons, by Infrogmation)
