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Recycling yields two key advantages: First, it allows reusing substantial amounts of waste that would otherwise end up in landfills or spoiling natural spaces; Second, it allows generating raw materials and avoid wasting materials and natural resources.

Several countries have managed to increase their recycling rates in recent years by investing in technology, and awareness campaigns and introducing policies aimed at encouraging citizens and businesses to recycle more and better.

generate enough electricity to power 250,000 households, and contribute to dramatically reduce waste and emissions.

Northern European countries are pioneers in the sustainable processing of urban and industrial waste.

Sweden’s become extremely successful at sorting and reusing waste, thanks to the firm commitment of its population, and everyone’s involvement in the process from their own households.

Neighbors are responsible for sorting, treating and segregating their household waste, and then complying with the strict and scheduled collection calendar.

One of the countries that have best understood the importance of the circular economy is Switzerland.

the country has become a pioneer in the recycling of organic waste, which is used to make compost.

one third of the food created in the world is spoiled or thrown away

also means a high cost in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

The organic waste collected is used to produce biogas to fuel power plants, crop fertilizers and livestock feed.

recycling rate has increased from 5% to 64%, one of the highest in Europe and expects to keep improving to become one of the world’s leading nations in this field.

rooftop garden last summer to provide fresh herbs and vegetables to the hotel’s Lockwood restaurant.

“barefoot beekeeping” system, which is a chemical-free, low-impact, sustainable and natural approach to producing honey.

the greenhouses El Dorado Royale Resort in Rivera Maya, Mexico hope to produce 211,699 pounds of fresh produce this year

can tour the 100,000-square-foot growing space

plans his menu around greenhouse ingredient

oga Ranch in Napa Valley

the sheep make ideal groundskeepers because they are only 24 inches tall at full size, so they can’t reach tree branches or trellised grapes.

2010, the resort has been collecting its compostable food products for the Upper Valley Disposal and Recycling Program, which then processes and shares the rich compost with area vineyards, farms, and resorts

Habana Outpost, where diners can ride a bicycle that powers the eatery’s blender

If they hop on the hotel’s exercise bike and generate up 100 watt hours of energy, they’ll earn a free meal

and is part of the hotel’s larger commitment to eco-friendliness, which includes a CO2-neutral building, solar panels, and groundwater-based heating and cooling systems.

their manure helps fertilize the soil,

At the Treehotel in Sweden, rooms are constructed without harming the forest, plus they have eco outdoor wood floors and use green hydroelectric power.

restaurant lights are powered by wind and solar energy; the staff provide glass flasks instead of bottled water;

The Hawaii Island Retreat on the Big Island’s north coast produces its own electricity through solar cells in photovoltaic panels on the roof of the property’s energy building.

Lake Nicaragua's Jicaro Island Ecolodge is operated by 2010 World Savers Award winner Cayuga Sustainable Hospitality

All of the wood used for construction or furniture came from trees downed by Hurricane Felix, which hit Nicaragua in 2007, and most of the wastewater is recycled to irrigate the trees and plants.

guests are given oxo-biodegradable bottles to use during their stay;

four months.

A decrease of smart cards will also have an environmental effect with less material used

A data centre is a facility used to house computer systems and their components, and it can be far and away the biggest contributor to an organisation’s carbon footprint. A data centre’s life expectancy is relatively long so it is imperative it is built to the highest standards in terms of efficiency as any excess energy use will lead to significant cost implications over the years.

1. Build the most energy-efficient data centre possible. This will save energy and costs over its lifespan. 2. Only get the data storage capacity that is currently required and forecast for the lifespan. Many data centres have excess capacity that burns energy (and therefore costs) unnecessarily. Don’t have servers or equipment that will not be used. 3. Cooling data centres. Traditionally cooling has been done by air circulation, which is very inefficient. Larger data centres already use other technologies to cool more efficiently, such as water cooling. 4. Virtualisation technology. Improve your system’s resource utilisation through virtualisation technology. Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, server, network, etc. and allows a single user to access several physical devices on one terminal. A computing device dedicated to an individual member of staff or allocated for one software application is highly inefficient and expensive. Virtualisation consolidates resources, requiring less power and cooling. 5. Consider cloud computing. This is a location-independent IT service, typically available over the internet, where shared servers provide resources, software and data to computers and other devices on demand, increasing IT capacity and capabilities without an organisation having to invest in new infrastructure. Keeping data virtually, or “in the clouds”, means less information stored on IT systems and therefore less energy being used to run the systems. Systems such as BT’s Virtual Data Centre, a hosted data centre that enables businesses to create, deploy, monitor and manage their own service through a self-service portal, claim to offer savings of up to 40% of the total cost of running one’s own data centre as well as reducing the space required, the level of emissions produced and the power consumed.

6. Measure and monitor power usage. Once you know what’s using the power, focus on why and whether it’s possible to reduce consumption.

1. Upgrade. Before buying new, investigate options to upgrade with the latest energy-efficient components to extend appliances’ working life and efficiency. 2. Green labels. Look out for the certification labels denoting more energy-efficient equipment, from Blue Angel in Germany to TCO in Sweden and Energy Star in the US (see below). 3. Screens. Opt for flat screen monitors, which reduce energy use by over two-thirds. 4. Get the right equipment. Consider your information technology needs against the tasks required. For example, laptops may be a better option in some circumstances because they have been developed to be energy-efficient and generally match the computer to the task required. Remember: not all staff have the same needs. 5. Consider running costs. Look at the life cycle costs, not just the purchase cost. Take note of running and standby costs of equipment. These can vary enormously.

Top 10 Tips to reduce running costs of office equipment (source: Carbon Trust) 1. Computers. Activate energy-saving features. In fact, most office equipment will have these features, so make sure they’re activated. 2. Standby features. Introduce a policy to activate standby features, don’t assume employees will do it. 3. Turn it off. Buy seven-day timers. These can save up to 70% on energy costs. 4. Monitor and manage the equipment that is peripheral to computers, such as speakers, printers, etc. and consider installing intelligent switch-off solutions. Printers can consume 30%-40% of their peak power demand when idling between printing and standby modes, so minimising this can produce cost savings, reduce heat output and increase its operating life. 5. Educate your staff. Consider a screen saver with an energy-saving message. 6. Rationalise your equipment via networking to reduce the number of printers (for example) in any office area. 7. Printers Use only black and white for internal documents and colour only when absolutely necessary. Consider the benefits of inkjet printers v laser printers. Inkjet energy use is much lower than that of a laser printer. Encourage staff to use print preview functions. Set default printing mode to double-sided. Use lower-specification printers, such as inkjets, for internal documents and encourage staff to use these for day-to-day use.

8. Photocopiers High volume copiers use more energy so should be used sparingly. Use low melting point inks (available from stationery suppliers). Encourage staff to copy in batches to increase standby time. Stick to black and white copiers and only use colour when absolutely necessary. Set default copying to double-sided. 9. Invest to save and purchase only what you need. 10. Don’t forget to motivate staff. Keep repeating the message of the importance of energy saving in ways that they can understand (for example, a computer monitor switched off overnight saves enough energy to microwave six dinners).

WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), or e-waste, is the term used for old or disposed electronic equipment. It covers both the toxic and valuable materials found in appliances. The most important lesson is to reuse, not recycle. With so much e-waste, and electrical devices such as computers and flat screens often being replaced well before the end of their shelf life and ending up in landfill, it’s imperative that the most is made of these materials by reusing them productively.

Options to investigate when trying to reduce e-waste are: 1. Can you upgrade your equipment with new energy efficient components? 2. Can it be used by someone else in the company? 3. Can it be given to a charity? (Note: charities must be registered to take WEEE.) 4. Will the manufacturer take back the old equipment and reuse parts in new products?

Developments on the horizon include: 1. Smaller, more efficient processors. The continuing development of microprocessors means a mobile phone can have around the same computational power as the average desktop computer back in 2000. 2. Memristors. Electronics giant HP is in the process of developing “memristors” (see photo above), which have greater memory storage capacity while requiring less energy and space. They are due to be on the shelf in about three years. 3. Specialist data centre design. Siemens recently launched its transformational Data Centre Solution, a groundbreaking strategy in data centre energy-efficient design and operation. It claims the system, which uses virtualization and efficient power and cooling, offers many benefits for businesses, including up to 50% energy savings through ground water cooling and IT costs reduced by 30%. 4. Outsourcing. Hotels of all sizes are starting to view IT outsourcing as a viable option to gain flexibility and reduce short-term costs and increase transparency of cost structures and processes. 5. Optimisation of resources. This will become a necessity either through virtualisation, networking or cloud computing. 6. Water cooling. IBM is currently working on a supercomputer that is cooled by water (a given volume of water can hold 4,000 times more waste than air), which claims to be 50% more energy efficient than the world’s leading systems. The Aquasar stacks many computer processors on top of each other with cooling water flowing between each one. IBM’s Dr Bruno Michel told the BBC in November 2010: “We plan that 10 to 15 years from now, we can collapse such a system into one sugar cube — we’re going to have a supercomputer in a sugar cube.”

Oracle was caught off guard. As a company not used to dealing with call-center-based customer service, it suddenly had to handle help desk requests for thousands of vendors

It took Oracle awhile to figure out how to plot a multi-year transition of Micros customers from license-based deals to Web-based, subscription services.

One hotelier said, “I know that Oracle recognizes that and [they are] very open about how much investment they need to make, but it is a risk to us as a business. As we are looking to try and innovate, not being able to plug other systems into Opera easily constrains what we can do.”

The first hotel group to agree to move all of its properties to Oracle’s cloud-based property management system is Mövenpick,

A typical global brand might have a dozen agreements with local Micros offices. Oracle streamlined the patchwork of deals into a single worldwide agreement.

“We’re the number one provider of property management systems in North American and worldwide,” he said. “We’re also taking market share in geographies where Micros had operated through partners.

Since the acquisition, the company boosted its number of customer service representatives by more than 30 percent to better handle the volume of requests

One global benchmark was to cut the wait time for customers calling the help desk to under two minutes, on average. The company is now meeting that goal, he said.The company set a goal of resolving at least 70 percent of customer support requests within an hour. Webster said it is now achieving that.

Oracle Hospitality is “growing above the market average.”

“We’ve made massive progress in bringing [the Micros property management system] Opera to the cloud,” Webster said.

Oracle Hospitality has boosted its research-and-development headcount by about 50 percent.

et us reduce the training time for staff by almost half and improve the speed of service for guests by nearly 40 percent.”

We’ve innovated in hardware, too. In the last year, we’ve been able to bring our complete new line of hardware onto tablets, not just fixed work stations, and a complete line of mobile solutions for our Opera property management system. We brought out a new housekeeping operations application via mobile, too.”

We’re now focused on helping our hotel customers create exceptional guest experiences while reducing the cost and complexity of IT.” He said hotels using Oracle no longer need database administrators or other IT support staff to manage the technology.

Opera Property Management System for multi-tenant hotels has integrations with more than 1,400 third-party tools, such as for accounting and revenue management.

Christian Weste, the boss of Hotel Lundia in Sweden, wrote: “Seems to be the same all over Europe and probably the rest of the world also. It takes months to get in touch with someone and even then the issue will most likely not be solved.”

Oracle Hospitality has responded to competition by widening the aperture of its target market. While Micros had tended to focus on larger hotels and chains, Oracle Hospitality says it wants it all — from so-called tier-one hotels in global capitals down to small independents in tiny corners of the globe.

Oracle’s pricing strategy may tell a different story. Its relatively high fees tends to favor large chains and pose obstacles for small group and independent hotels.

Oracle will win the day only if it acts as a platform that can play nicely and affordably with new third-party tools, such as for revenue management; new businesses, such as alternative lodging, and new ways of doing business, such as alternative forms of payment like Apple Pay, Alipay, bitcoin, and Google Wallet.

Offering a new but desired technology the Ushuaia Beach Hotel in the capital of Ibiza has been able to help make your stay even more fun while sharing it with your friends.

You can now save yourself the time and trouble of checking into a hotel at the front desk. With the advanced technology the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm Sweden offers, you will be able to bypass the check-in process and head right to your room.

No more calling and requesting services at this high class hotel. The innovative technology at the Eccleston Square Hotel London allows you to order your services through your iPad. Using the touch screen you not only request your room to be serviced you can request what time your room be serviced. With a touch of your iPad screen you can easily make reservations at the spa.