John Fitzpatrick, a hotelier who owns two four-star hotels in Midtown Manhattan, has had to troubleshoot a number of issues during his career.
Guests wouldn’t stop stealing his hand towels, emblazoned with an “F” for Fitzpatrick Hotel Group, so he removed the lettering, and the pilfering stopped. During the height of the pandemic, Mr. Fitzpatrick took away the magazines he normally provided in his hotel rooms so guests wouldn’t worry about strangers having touched what they were reading.
Now, Mr. Fitzpatrick and his team are brainstorming ideas for how to deal with a new problem: replacing the small plastic toiletry bottles that will be banned in larger hotels throughout New York State beginning Jan. 1, 2025.
“In this day and age, we have to watch our carbon footprint, and we have to stop using plastics and all sorts of stuff as best we can,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.
Next year, New York will join California as the only two states in the country to ban the little bottles that are ubiquitous in most hotel bathrooms. Washington State has passed a bill to phase out plastic toiletries by Jan. 1, 2027, and other states are weighing similar measures.
The New York ban will only apply to hotels with 50 or more rooms. Hotels will be fined $250 for initial violations and $500 for further infractions. The money raised will be funneled to the state’s Environmental Protection Fund.
Hotels and motels with fewer than 50 rooms will need to comply with the law beginning Jan. 1, 2026.
The bill was originally introduced in the State Legislature in 2019 by Todd Kaminsky, a former state senator, and Steven Englebright, a former state assemblyman who is now a Suffolk County legislator. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the measure into law in 2021, but its implementation was delayed to give hotels a chance to use the small bottles that had already purchased, Mr. Englebright said.
“New York is the size of many countries, so New York’s role is watched,” Mr. Englebright said. “When we do something important, it has the potential to be looked at as a model for our sister states.”
The ban reflects a nationwide push to reduce plastic waste in the hotel industry. The InterContinental Hotels Group and Marriott are among the larger chains that have pledged to curb their reliance on plastic, starting with toiletry bottles.
In a statement on Wednesday, a Marriott spokeswoman confirmed that the chain had begun to phase out small plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles, opting instead for “larger, pump-topped bottles.” By the end of last year, 95 percent of Marriott’s hotels had transitioned to the larger bottles, with more expected to make the move this year, according to the statement.
“Once fully implemented, we have estimated that the switch prevents around 500 million small bath amenity bottles from going to landfills each year,” the spokeswoman said.
For smaller high-end hotels, such as the ones that Mr. Fitzpatrick owns, the transition will be more complicated. He said he worried about the pump-top bottles, which are usually mounted on walls and are difficult to clean. Mr. Fitzpatrick’s team recently pitched another option: tiny tinfoil packages similar to the ketchup packets that come with French fries. But Mr. Fitzpatrick questioned how anyone could open them in the shower with wet hands.
“You know, I thought companies would be coming in with plenty of new ideas,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “But here we are sitting around the table.”
Tourism rates in New York City have largely rebounded from the pandemic. According to New York City Tourism and Conventions, a marketing organization, the city attracted 61.8 million tourists in 2023, 93 percent of the record number who visited in 2019.
Even so, Mr. Fitzpatrick noted that guests were more cautious than ever about hygiene, and he was concerned that they might think twice before handling a larger bottle that other guests had presumably used. That is why, he said, his hotels would probably be switching to a new luxury toiletry provider for their larger bottles, in the hopes that guests would be pleased enough with the fancy brand that they would forget their cleanliness quibbles.
Ideally, of course, they won’t be so pleased that they steal the bottles, as they stole the towels.
“It is a worry for us,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “We’re not totally convinced of how it’s going to work.”
The post With Tiny Shampoo Bottles Soon to Be Banned, N.Y. Hotels Weigh Options appeared first on New York Times.
