Sustainable Hospitality and Travel with Greg M. Poirier

In this episode, Cory Connors welcomes Greg Poirier to discuss how hotels and resorts can operate more sustainably and how travelers can reduce their impact on the road. Greg shares his path from dishwasher and night auditor to hotel general manager, and how his interest in sustainability and social equity led him to Audubon International. He explains the origins of Audubon International — founded in 1987 as a certification body rooted in the legacy of the New York State Audubon chapter — and walks through how its hospitality certification program works, from membership and a detailed designation application to on-site, third-party audits. Greg and Cory dig into practical sustainability opportunities in the industry, including waste tracking, energy savings, refillable programs, and the emerging trend of planned sustainable resort communities.

Key Topics Discussed:

•  Greg's career journey through independent hotels and into sustainability leadership
• The history and mission of Audubon International across golf, communities, and hospitality
• Using tools like EZ3 Data to track haulers, containers, and waste metrics
• Smart thermostats and occupancy-based energy savings of 20–40% on electric bills
• Refillable water programs, filtered water stations, and moving away from single-use plastic bottles
• The nuance of bulk shampoo/conditioner dispensers and the role of Clean the World
• Audubon International's four certification levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum
• Advice for travelers on how to choose and advocate for more sustainable properties

Resources Mentioned:

• Audubon International
• EZ3 Data (waste tracking platform)
• Clean the World (bulk amenity recycling program)
• Populus Hotels (Denver, Seattle)
• Cabot developments
• Black Desert Resort (Utah)

Contact:

Listeners can learn more or reach out to Greg directly:
- Website: auduboninternational.org
- Email: greg@auduboninternational.org

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Transcript

0:06

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors presented by Atlantic Packaging. I'm your host, Cory Connors. In today's episode, I connected with the Global Director of Sustainable Hospitality Certification Programs for Audubon International, Greg Pouillet. We talk about how hotels and resorts can be more sustainable and how to travel more sustainably. I'd also like to thank our sponsors, 3M, SpecRite, and Lorax EPI. We couldn't do this without you. Welcome to sustainable packaging. I'm so excited to have Mr. Greg Poirier with an MBA, global director, sustainable hospitality certification programs at Audubon international. How are you, sir? Very good, nice to be here. Hi, Cory. Great to have you on. I've heard about this organization for many, many years. It's been around a long time. Can you tell us a little bit about you before we get into that? Do you have a very impressive background in sustainability and environmental causes? Why are you so focused on this environmental causes? Well, you know, I grew up in a generation where we were exposed to it pretty early while we were developing our critical thinking and it was quite in vogue. And like many in the course of life, you get distracted, you get a family, your careers, you're on the treadmill of life and you lose a little focus on some of the things maybe that you care more about. And I found myself working in a hotel business. that I didn't want to just go and get a bigger job and a bigger salary and get further removed from the guests. And I also sort of was attracted to places or opportunities where I could do things that I really cared about. Sustainability and social equity are both kind of topics that fit really well into the fabric of the hospitality business because we have an immigrant-based population that are employees. They're wonderful. They can be, it's one of the few. places where you could start off as a dishwasher or night auditor like I did and become a general manager. So a lot of that landscape was attractive. So I ended up working more with independent properties that I either managed or worked for teams that manage. So, and those tend to be ones where you have a little bit more elbow room to influence your own decisions on purchasing and the waste byproducts of That's excellent. Yeah, you can make a real impact there. It sounds uh very, very exciting. Let's talk about the Autobahn International. What is it? What's your role there? Sure. So Autobahn International came out of being the New York State chapter of the Autobahn Society. So they're doing environmental work focused on birds, right, and awareness and preservation and such. the legacy was with open land, environmental concerns and interests. And in 1987, pivoted away to become a certification body. At the time, there wasn't a lot of that kind of activity going on. And having expertise in the outdoors and the scientists and the community involved. That's where our first pillar was born. And that morphed into golf courses as a mainstream business. And that's grown exponentially. We're one of the biggest golf course certification bodies on the planet. And so a little group of people that can make impact, We're a lower cost, higher impact kind of focus, but it's only team of 11 full-time equivalents. We're based out of Troy, New York. and but we're in 37 countries. So as an outgrowth of doing outdoors and golf courses that brought us into resorts, so we organically started getting more hotel and hospitality projects and let that grow organically pretty much up until a few years ago. Now it's becoming a much bigger deal and for me as a hotelier and technologist in the space, it was a great opportunity to just have a chapter where that's all I thought about all day long and tried to make more impact. by doing it within an organization like Audubon International. Very impressive. And you certify them. Can you tell us what that means to be certified by the Audubon Society or the Audubon International? What does that mean? Sure, so I'll speak from the, because we have three buckets. We do golf and lot of different programs in golf. We do communities and then we do hospitality. So I'm gonna speak from the hospitality viewpoint, which is hotels and resorts. So we have a membership. You uh join as a member, very inexpensive initiation fee. And then we start the process of certification. We have a very detailed, application, a designation application. It's, think, up to 33 pages and hundreds and hundreds of questions and opportunity to give commentary and to kind of put forward what you do in all the disciplines, right? There's energy, there's waste reuse, there's water or indoor air quality. And then there's the other ones that are stakeholder related, people related. So it's community, internal, external, ownership, neighborhood, and how you can leverage for good. what kind of business you bring into those communities from which all your employees come. Right. So so it's kind of circular by nature, not necessarily in practice. And and that's so that's it. So once they fill out a designation application, we review it. They're pretty complicated. They involve all disciplines in the hospitality stuff. So it's got food and beverage, got housekeeping, got front office, got marketing, it's got public relations and a lot of maintenance and engineering type of. the science-based things. So then we review it and we come by. We always do site audits. We don't certify anybody without, we don't do virtual audits, which is a little peeve thing, but that's a differentiator because a lot of people do. And then we come and we spend, you know, as much time as it takes on the property, walking it and quantifying what they applied and what they put is what's valid and it's there because we are the third party auditor. and we are the third party certification body. We don't hire a fourth party to come in and do certifications, which some reasons to believe people think that's important and necessary, but we live and die by our own reputation and we've got very high scientifically based standards and a legacy of doing it. That's excellent. Well, it sounds very impressive. Can you tell us about some something that you recommend or you've implemented that helps people be more sustainable in the hotel industry? can. So let's talk. Well, let's go with waste, right? Waste is probably the least well reported. And I would say the single biggest opportunity right now to advance and accelerate sustainability and hospitality. And that's because, first of all, we don't really track and create metrics and study it. And without data, you can't try to map a path to improve it. And it often involves lowering your expenses because the complexity of hauler invoices with the thousands and thousands of cities, towns, regions, states, and federal people that manage it legislatively and through legal responsibilities, and then the industry of haulers, it's ripe for bad information. So I, so the focus today and what we're driving is encouraging people and there's very low cost, very, very scientifically based tools, technology tools right now available. Um, easy three data is one I've been doing a lot of work with because it's so affordable and it's, and, and it was designed by hotel companies requesting something that was more verifiably valid than algorithmically AI driven alone because there wasn't enough for the AI to take it over. So we kind of jumped the gun and this is breaking it back down to the haulers and the actual containers and mapping that kind of stuff out. So I think that's the singles easiest solution right now to advance all kinds of things and what it brings focus to, as you well know, it's not just packaging and that types of things, but it starts at procurement and ends at waste and procurement tackling alone without it looking at the waste component. packaging, all those details kind of feather themselves in. So thematically, it's a little bit all-encompassing. So that's the latest silver bullet tech strategy. We do a lot of them. Energy is another one. People are getting pretty comfortable understanding that there's industry-specific energy-saving devices that are basically smart thermostats that know when no one physically is in the room. Adoption is still... low 20s at best. um So there's lots of opportunity to save energy, no matter how well designed the building is, no matter how modern your building management systems are, they can still eliminate 20 to 40 % of your monthly electric bills, which are astronomical in these buildings. uh without inconvenience, yeah, without inconvenience, yes. So there's a lot of good things out there. And so we're evangelists about it. We're all our members. But such a simple idea and it makes perfect sense, save huge amounts of money and help save the planet. That's excellent. I travel a lot and I'm often giving advice on what people should do to be more sustainable when they travel. I'd love to hear from you. What do you recommend people do when they travel to be more sustainable? Well, first of all, let them know that that's something you focus on at the property level, right? I am always asking them, you know, do they have a program? Do they have a green team or committee? Because it's a people oriented business and giving service outside your own interest is what drives people's motivation to be in the hospitality business because it's a thousands year old craft, right? So the spirit of hospitality relies in that and sustainability marries into that so well because you're thinking about the whole you're not thinking about you and your purchasing and your packaging you're thinking about well maybe I can do my little part but collectively we can have a bigger impact so there's a good fit so I'm always asking about that and then I'm looking to see you know they might have now gotten really sustainable packaging for their amenities but they still have that plastic scope bottle of mouthwash or something that's like really just ruin the whole scene right you got that last 10 % means 100 % of the message right So I can be very critical about it, but I'm open-eyed. I understand it's a business and you got to turn it and we want to turn it on to dime. But the reality is you got to turn it one step at a time. so getting staff involved, I love talking to line staff. Yes. And, yeah, I highly recommend refillables and things like that. A solid shampoo instead of liquid, things like that are really great for traveling and for personal use. Are hotels implementing refill kind of programs for, for, for water bottles. And I always travel with a water bottle. That's number one. Right, I'm tired of being given plastic single use water bottles as a treat because I travel and I get enough points to have status. I was like, stop. But I am noticing, um certainly in different parts of the world, it's different. I was at a Hilton in Paris at the Charles de Gaulle airport last December, and they had just gotten away from their single use plastic water and had carafts in every room and every floor now had a filtered water dispenser. I was at Ritz Carlton in Denver. uh great sustainability focus at the team and in the community and they're continuing to install more filtered water stations with the goal to have them on every floor as they try to get away and maybe give Ritz-Carlton Denver, you know, multiple use water containers as a reward rather than plastic water bottles. So there's a lot of movement there. There's a lot of ways to go, but there's certainly some encouraging things and I do that same thing. Occasionally I get pushed back on that idea because people say that tap water doesn't taste good everywhere that they go, which is just true, but it's great to hear that hotels are putting in those filtered water stations. It's such a simple and easy thing to do and will save money. And over the long term, they don't have to buy water bottles and they don't have to recycle them or put them in the waste stream. if they don't have recycling locally. So are you finding people are actually saving money by doing that? I think so. I haven't seen statistical research done on it. I think at the time is now to share it. And I think that uh I think it's important. And you mentioned tap water. It's like we forget that tap water is by design meant to be portable and drinkable and perfect for human. And like in Nantucket, the island Nantucket, they promote their aquifers as the best tasting water on the planet. So they don't even have plastic water bottles. They're actually selling you the idea that bring some of our water home out of your tap because you're going to love it on the trip home, right? Yes, I'm from Oregon as we talked about before we started and our water here is really good. And so I'm used to that. And people think I'm crazy when I drink tap water in other parts of the country, but I always try it at least. There are certain areas that it doesn't taste very good to be honest, but it is certainly something we tried it to use if possible, but we love those filtered water dispensers, those water bottle. filler stations are awesome. I'm seeing them a lot more often you see them at airports now, know ten years ago you didn't so yeah Yeah, even differentiating with you have an option for still or bubble water or uh warm or room temperature or cold. It's pretty cool how to see how they're kind of accommodating all these different tastes in water. But let's talk about shampoo and mini shampoos and mini conditioner bottles. Those seem to have kind of gone away, gone out of fashion in hotels. uh Are they not allowed anymore or have they discovered as a hotel chains that the larger bottles refilling those is less expensive? And we have to be very careful because there has been a mass movement to the larger containers. The challenge is small properties, a lot of properties don't have the stuff and don't refill them. So if they don't associate with Clean the World, that will do a triceable program for the recycling of those larger single use plastics, which is an amazing program, right? But if they're not doing it, the bottles look like they're being refilled and that's a little bit, you know, it needs more scrutiny and more journalism to make sure that to it honest because there's a lot of ones that say they do it, but if you don't audit them and they don't have receipts and they don't show you the shipping labels to clean the world, then that's just another single use plastic that's going to a landfill. And I don't think it's the majority they're doing it, but I certainly think there's wiggle room because they just look. like they could be fillable and some of them look like that and they can't. They just that's the design style. So packaging and kind of masking is still it's still part of it. But I think it's because we're in transition. It sounds like that's why we really need your organization to hold these companies and people accountable to their sustainability initiatives. Right, I I love the industry and I love to travel. So I'm not about shutting down airfares and, you know, not having so many hotels and not traveling. I think that's good for you human spirit. And realistically, it's not going to go away. It's just how do we do it better, more responsibly? And there's a big appetite. I think most people want to leave places now better than they found them, which means local procurement, which means more sustainable packaging, which means all these things. So it's important. I wanted to ask you, do you think that hotels actually gain business by focusing on being more sustainable? Do you think it's a cost? Do you think it's a way to sell more? I do think that position properly, it's a marketing advantage. And I think there's lots of case studies to prove it. We have members that I could point to that are like that. think also, though, you have to it's not just you can be a more profitable one by being more sustainable. It's not always going to be about more revenue. Sometimes it's going to be about less expenses and energy being number one or two or three highest expenses. Staff turnover, retention and recruitment. I can tell you case studies, can point to properties that have no problems getting service employees because they think it's such a cool place to work. And they tell all their friends and it's like going to a Whole Foods 20 years ago, right? Either did or you didn't, but you kind of got the vibe. But the people that were there like working there and they'll find you your staff. And, know, we've always been an industry that has to, when well run, that's your biggest advantage because your employees will proudly bring other people they know. But I'll point to the populace, urban villages out of Denver. They have two prototype properties. They're called populace. One, they did a ground zero build, I mean, a new build in Denver. And another one was a reclamation of a building, a retrofit in Seattle. And they need to do case studies because they're proving not just higher profitability and lesser expenses. but they got a sticky in the community that's driving their foot traffic through the restaurants like they used to in the 80s and 70s when you could compete with restaurants with a hotel F and the outlet. And it's because of the vibe. It's because of how many local farms are supplying their products and all the different people on the ground that know what's going on. They're just so proud of it that it's back to the craft. You're being a craftsperson. delivering a service and very proud that your food and your service is outstanding and it's really refreshing. I agree. When, when you're at a place and you can tell that they really care, it's obvious. It's obvious in it. And it shows throughout the whole property. shows throughout the people, you know, is, are the hallways clean or the bathroom clean all, all these things. And, it's the food good. Does the waiter or waitress actually act like they want to be there? you you can tell, if, somebody's just punching a clock or, passionate about what they do. Well said. does stand out. Yeah. Well, anything else you want to tell us about your organization? How do, how do people reach out to you? What's, what's the best way? Well, thank you for that. The easiest way is to go to the website, autobahninternational.org. And my email is greg at autobahninternational.org. can always reach out. I mean, organizationally, I'd say just to elaborate a little bit more on some of our kind of newer projects that have come up in the last five years or so. We're doing some massive development work, pre-development and opening work for these huge planned design resort communities. We're working on right now in Puerto Rico. We did Black Desert in Utah. And these are works in progress where while they're doing construction or building their golf courses or building their hotels, We're already engaged with them and they join, it's our signature platinum program, but these are combined communities, hotels, operations, and uh golf courses. And it's probably, there's nobody that can do all that in one package. And we're finding they came to us first and now we're doing them, you know, we're following Cabot development out of Canada, around the world for all their projects, their golf course, residential, hospitality components. And it's quite exciting because, you know, On one hand, it's easier when you're doing something from scratch. On the other hand, when that's what they're seeking to do from scratch is encouraging, it's motivating. And it's not that difficult. We have existing members now that are going back to maybe make an adjustment and put some capital X into their maintenance facility for their golf course, because that could be a big ding to reach a level to be able to qualify for that program. But everything else qualifies. So it makes sense to do so because they get more attention. People with money don't mind hospitality, don't mind sustainability. If they're going to buy millions of dollars worth of a second or third or an extra home somewhere in a resort community, they kind of like that it's really focused on sustainability and it's good for the physical asset. It holds its value better. I agree 100%. They almost expect it, I think. And I think that's great news. Are there different levels of certification? it like, like a hotel can be a four star hotel or a five star hotel? Can you be a premium Audubon uh international prove or certification or how does that work? Yeah, that's a great question. the truth is for all program, all certification bodies to have levels. In our case, it's silver, bronze, gold and platinum. And I would admit and say that, hey, getting a bronze certification or silver isn't really a bragging right, other than it's showing that you're officially committed to the journey. Because as you well know, you know, the badge is all good to have, but it's really about the journey and we're there to help encourage and develop and suggest how they can improve because we have expertise that we can help share with them as a member and as a responsibility to our membership. And one of the, you know, we have organizations that are booking reservations that, you know, as long as you have a credential, you get to be certified as sustainable and I don't think the public would agree that a bronze and silver or one or two keys would feel that sustainably culturally oriented versus ours. it's a gold or platinum, you'll walk in and you'll feel it. And if that was part of your booking decision-making process, we're not at the point yet where we were being good to have the nuances be transparent. we talk, you know, we scream transparency and that's a good thing. Right? We're all about it. But we also got to be, we are the ones that understand the nuances and we have to take that responsibility or we're not being sustainable. Right? And so we always encourage our members, listen, you could certify and your first round, you could not get a bronze, but you're going to get a scorecard. You're going to go through the process. You're going to understand the types of questions that if you could answer differently. So it provides you the roadmap ahead and for your journey. And I think having some structure there. Hoteliers are smart people. And whether they're line employees or not, it recognizes and taps into everybody's superpowers and in any building, there's a lot of superpowers. You just got to make them want to be more engaged and love working there and being part of these bigger picture things. so that comes full circle to culture, right? And so in our case, yeah, we have bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, of which we only have maybe less than 10 platinum members. Should travelers like me go to your website to find uh the list of these really highly rated hotel chains or properties? I mean, you can because we list them all. They're all there. They're all one at a time. They're not like in categories for booking engines or for reservations because that's not our mission. But we encourage those and people like the Expedia companies and other online bookings, they take our uploads every month, right? or every periodically so that all of our members get listed in that traffic. But I just admit it to the nuance. They just admit them whether they've been certified or not. not necessarily what category they reached on their journey. And I think that's where we need to collectively head toward. And right now we're still fluid, right? It's still fairly new as far as becoming mainstream. There's a lot of people more focused on controlling market share than necessarily just impact, right? We all care about impact, but you know. Well, thank you again, Greg. This has been really insightful and keep up the great work. Travel sustainability is so key to the planet. Thank you. And to you, look forward to keeping up, Cory, and good luck in your next couple of presentations. I'm jealous about not going to Paris. All right, all the best. Thanks. Bye.