The 5 worst offenders of single-use

What I’ve Seen It Do in a Team

The most memorable moment from eleven years of running these campaigns wasn’t a statistic or a policy change or a reduction in landfill.

It was a competition.

A hotel I’d worked with in Cambodia invited me back for their Plastic Free July waste-to-art competition. Teams had spent weeks creating art from waste materials, a traditional Cambodian house made from used plastic straws, an ocean scene from oyster shells and melted plastic, a clock from salvaged pieces from the garbage room.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The work was beautiful. More than that, when each team presented their project, they talked about the environmental reasoning behind every material choice. They talked about the collaborative process and why it mattered to them.

This was three years after our first training session together. Nobody had told them to care this much. It wasn’t scripted. It had become theirs.

That’s what a well-run Plastic Free July campaign can produce inside a team. Ownership.

Why This Matters for Hospitality Specifically

If you’re running a hotel you might be asking: ‘what does it have to do with my operation?’

Everything. Here’s why.

Your housekeeping team, your kitchen team, your front desk team, they’re consumers too. They bring plastic into their lives every day in ways that are identical to your guests. When you run a Plastic Free July campaign internally, you’re not just addressing your operational footprint. You’re giving your team a lived experience of what you’re asking your guests to engage with. In hotels that have come to me that are already plastic free front of house, they’re coming to me because they want to get things in order back of house as well.

And there’s a commercial case that has nothing to do with plastic.

Australian hospitality’s 38.7% annual staff turnover rate is one of the most significant commercial challenges in the industry right now. Wherever you’re located, the research on what drives retention is consistent: people stay where they feel engaged, where they have agency, where the organisation they work for has values they can connect with.

A month-long, team-based, clearly defined challenge with visible outcomes is one of the most cost-effective engagement tools available. I’ve seen it create camaraderie that outlasts the month. It’s magic to see it spark conversations between departments that hadn’t meaningfully communicated before. And when it changes how a team thinks about their operation permanently, because they discovered together that change was possible, well, that’s real success on so many levels.

In the overwhelming information around sustainability and climate change, Plastic Free July is a tangible and actionable starting point. It comes with a global framework, free resources from the Plastic Free July Foundation, and a community of millions of people doing the same thing at the same time. Even outside of July, the momentum is there, the opportunity is available.

In NSW, reusables legislation is arriving from 2027, requiring businesses to accept reusable cups and phase out single-use items, the operators building internal capability now, who’ve already brought their teams along on the journey, will be ready.

What a Good Campaign Actually Looks Like

In my experience, the campaigns that work best share a few characteristics.

Companies involve the whole team from the beginning, sharing the conversation and coming up with ideas. What single-use plastics can we eliminate this month? What can we replace them with? What do our guests most notice? These questions, asked genuinely and acted on collectively, produce better outcomes than any top-down initiative.

There’s a visible, shared goal and a specific target: reduce single-use plastic amenity placement by 50% this month, eliminate plastic water bottles from all meeting rooms, switch to reusable cups in the staff kitchen, etc. It gives the team something concrete to work toward and celebrate.

Teams celebrate what changes. At the end of the month, getting everyone together and seeing what changed has been a moment of pride and an opportunity to talk about what comes next. The celebration isn’t just a nice gesture, it’s an important part of the process.

The teams I’ve seen carry the most lasting change from Plastic Free July are the ones who used July to begin a conversation that never really ended.

The Real Question

Eleven years in, I’m more convinced than ever that Plastic Free July is valuable. Not primarily because of the plastic it reduces, though that matters, but because of what it does to the people who participate in it genuinely.

It gives them a felt experience of agency. Of being part of something bigger than their individual choices. Of seeing that change is possible when people decide together that it is.

In the hospitality industry there’s a massive opportunity to build staff retention, engagement and purpose.

So if you’ve been on the fence about running a Plastic Free July campaign in your property, if you’ve been waiting for a better time, a bigger budget, a clearer plan, here’s my honest message:

You don’t need to care about plastic to run this. You need to care about your team.

The plastic reduction is what comes out the other side.

If not July, when?