The project “Hotel & Restaurants Zero Waste”, the brainchild of Antonino Esposito, is aimed at stimulating innovation in accommodation (not just hotels and restaurants, but also other facilities, shops, beaches, etc … ), promoting education and environmental sustainability in tourism, so the concept of “sustainable tourism” can be considered finally a reality and not a goal.

The strategy comes in the wake of international movements “Zero waste” and from the charisma of people like the US scientist Paul Connett, in Italy President of the scientific committee of the Zero Waste Commission of Capannori, and Rossano Ercolini, president of Zero Waste Italy and awarded in 2013 with the Goldman Environmental Prize, rewarded by President Barack Obama.

The “Hotels & Restaurants Zero Waste” project looks at the activities that want, on one hand, promote ecologically virtuous behavior, and on the other hand a practical effect in reducing consumption of dependent territory. The goal behind the idea of the strategy is to make the hospitality industry, which by definition is nourished by the beauty and peculiarity generally linked to the territory, the symbol of sustainability and therefore respect and preservation. A kind of “hospitality” which opens to sustainability as “value”: hospitality that moves away from the logic of globalization and from the aseptic standards of an overvalued “quality”; hospitality that rediscovers the vernacular meaning of welcome, which comes close to man and to his simplest and primary needs: starting from the man with his needs that becomes a tourist, and coming to tourism, which becomes sustainable.

The project includes, at the same time, also economic connotation: the basic idea, in fact, is to work in synergy with the local administrations to restructure the rates of the waste tax based on the amount of the waste produced and the of the quality of the differentiated collection carried out. For participating businesses, the strategy proposes the fulfillment of some steps by establishing operating guidelines, aimed at achieving concrete policy of waste and wastage reduction. A necessary condition for the success of the program is to obtain a management and a formation of staff in line with the principles of environmental sustainability; thanks to the adoption of a training paradigm, oriented by the awareness of the new tourists and entrepreneurs and supported by an efficient monitoring of initiatives, it is possible to can give impetus to a change in values and priorities, accompanied by measurable savings in the consumption of resources, undoubtedly an important incentive that goes to join the others of a purely environmental nature.