Hotels

In the hospitality industry, holidays lead to a significant uptick in companies booking parties. After all, every business needs a place to celebrate the year in review and look forward to the year to come. Typically, that place is a hotel ballroom.

Special events can be huge economic drivers for municipalities, venues, and food service providers — but they also come with unique waste management challenges. The goal for any large-scale entertainment operation is to manage waste both safely and efficiently. In order to do that, managers must carefully plan multi-stream waste systems, and they must provide staff with the tools they need to safely route each type of waste toward its own unique destination.

From the smallest bed and breakfast to the grandest luxury hotel, waste management can easily get out of control in the lodging industry. It's an issue of sheer scale: Green Hotelier, an industry journal, reports that every guest creates two pounds of waste for each night they stay. Meanwhile, the average hotel in the U.S. has 290 rooms, 64.4 percent are occupied on a given night.

Staff in the entertainment and hospitality industry strive to keep their hustle and bustle behind the scenes, which can lead to sacrifices in ergonomics. They want patrons to enjoy an event or a vacation with no stress or worries. But all that hard work adds up, and without ergonomic habits and equipment, it could leave employees taking sick days or injury time at disproportionately high rates.

What's the best way to keep housekeepers safe during hotel waste management tasks? Unsurprisingly, it's all about ergonomics. Here are the basics:

The average hotel guest leaves about 2 pounds of waste behind for every night they stay, reports industry site Green Hotelier. Hotels might have hundreds, even thousands, of rooms per floor. Two pounds per night per room can add up quickly, and somebody has to move that waste through the disposal stream.