Hotels have made a righteous first step with their efforts to eliminate single-use plastics with a fervour not seen since they decided to place tent placards in bathrooms, describing their towel renewal policies.

The pressure on businesses to cultivate conservational practices is high and it’s positive to see how receptive brands are to it. The flash flood of press releases that have seeped through my inbox over the past year, with hotels and F&B businesses declaring their commitment to eliminating single-use plastics over the last year could fill a landfill (especially if I’d printed them).

The war waged on single use plastics is now considered the bare minimum when it comes to brands cultivating sustainable practices. So, companies must try to find acceptable alternatives to the products they use, think more broadly about what achieving ‘sustainability’ actually encompasses, and still yield a profit.

Understanding the fundamentals and each part of what makes a business both sustainable and profitable takes work, as Cempedak Island, a luxury private island in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago, will attest.

Opened last year, the all-bamboo, adult-only resort has embedded sustainable practices into its architecture and operations from the very beginning, and it seems to be paying off in more ways than one.

It’s been a long process though and one that has taken a fair bit of experimentation, trial and error.

How it learned by doing and aiming for the Long Run

“In the beginning, we didn’t really know much about what we were doing. There weren’t a lot of resources that outlined how to build and run a sustainable business. While the sustainability ‘movement’ is far from young, there is still incredibly limited information about how to implement better practices,” said Cempedak and Nikoi Island founder and director, Andrew Dixon.

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