Christmas has never looked so GREEN: For the 2022 Christmas celebration, GREEN Hospitality was invited by the Hong Kong Tourism Board to join the Hong Kong Winter Fest at the West Kowloon Cultural District, with its own Christmas-themed lodge at the Christmas Wonderland. From 23 to 27 December, visitors came to GREEN Hospitality’s gleaming mirror lodge facade and participated in sustainable handicraft workshops and charity sales.
To offer visitors different sustainable experiences, GREEN Hospitality has teamed up with Soap Cycling and CHOMP, two important players in the Hong Kong sustainability scene.
The collaborative effort means that visitors were able to participate in a number of activities that aimed to educate the public on sustainable issues as well as encourage new habits they can adopt for a “greener” life.
Upcycling Waste into Christmas Ornaments and Postcards
Over 70 participants joined the GREEN workshops to create their own eco-friendly Christmas ornaments by using walnut shells with scrap paper and fabric, as well as personalised postcards decorated with natural painting made from food ingredients. After participating in such creative sessions, visitors were equipped with new inspirations to give a new life to waste in their daily life.
Digital Catalogue with Upcycling Recipes and Tips
Festive occasions are often celebrated with food and gifts in abundance. While the experience can be a merry one, especially when the offering is a gesture of generosity and sharing, it can also result in unnecessary waste.
That is why GREEN Hospitality partnered with CHOMP to offer a complimentary digital catalogue with recipes for food waste upcycling. Packed with ideas on upcycling festive leftovers, the catalogue also offers a couple of Christmas bonus tips such as a tutorial to create your own upcycled Christmas decoration. If you missed us at the Christmas Wonderland, you can download the catalogue here for free:
How GREEN Are You?
To help visitors to our lodge understand sustainability in a fun and engaging way, we invited them to the “How GREEN are you?” Q&A game, where we tested their knowledge on sustainability issues through questions on the GREEN Advent Calendar.
Participants competed against each other to see who would get the highest score and win a special gift, while all respondents who answered the quiz correctly entered an exciting lucky draw to win cool eco-prizes. Interested in finding out how sustainability-savvy you are? Feel free to fill in the quiz here.
MEY Soap Charity Sales:
Sustainability is not just about the environment but also about empowering disadvantaged communities and providing them with equitable access to resources.
At GREEN’s lodge, visitors were able to buy Soap Cycling’s MEY soaps, produced by the MEY (Minorities, Elderly, and Youth) workers who receive a fair wage for their work at the soap recycling charity. The soap bars were made with rescued coconut oil and natural ingredients, with zero plastic waste. What made the soap sales especially meaningful is that the proceeds would go into helping the MEY workers develop their soap-making career.
New habits start with simple everyday actions. With the activities held at the Christmas Wonderland, GREEN Hospitality demonstrated a plethora of creative ways that people can start adopting to reduce their impact on the environment through simple behavioural changes.
Festive times are a great time for reflection. At GREEN Hospitality, we are honoured to be given the opportunity to engage the public to rethink how to start new sustainability habits in the new year. If you want to dig deeper on the sustainability front, check out our research reports and various resources on our website!
About Our Partners:
Soap Cycling is a nonprofit organization that works with the hospitality industry to collect, process, and distribute lightly used soap bars and bottled amenities. These life-saving items are then distributed to disadvantaged communities. Their vision is to use soap related operations as a tool to engage the local community & inspire the next generation to reach their full potential in leading the way to a more sustainable future. Read more about Soap Cycling initiatives on their website: https://soapcycling.org/
CHOMP is a food-saving app designed to change the way people feel about food consumption and encourage sustainable living in Hong Kong. They provide F&B businesses with a simple and easy way to manage their food surplus at the end of each day. These perfectly edible foods are then made available to you at a discounted price on our platform, ready to be rescued. What they value are sustainability, collaboration and community. Learn more about CHOMP on their website:https://chomphk.com/