World’s best green hotels: While many hotels and restaurant chains around the world are just starting to eliminate plastic straws, Angama Mara, the award-winning luxury safari lodge in Kenya’s famed Maasai Mara, is already celebrating one year of being virtually plastic-free.
Kenya is on the short-list of countries which have outlawed the use and distribution of plastic shopping bags, to reduce plastic waste, but not single-use plastic straws.
While not all the kinks have yet been worked out of such an enormous amendment in federal law, the change already has been noticeable, and there are far fewer plastic shopping bags scattered and fluttering about, from rural villages to Nairobi.
Eco-hotels like Angama Mara have stepped up to the plate and go even further than the national law, enacted in 2017.
Simply, reducing plastic waste helps ensure a healthier, more sustainable local environment for guests, the community and for wildlife.
Here are some of the eco-friendly intiatives at Angama Mara –
The lodge was constructed with a minimal footprint in mind, and was built with its own water bottling plant.
The lodge serves water to guests in reusable glass bottles. That has eliminated the need for some 75,000 plastic bottles and has saved the lodge $30,000 over three years.
Guest amenities are provided in refillable porcelain dispensers, eliminating the cost and wastefulness of those little single-use plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, bath gel and both lotion.
Guest laundry is provided in linen bags, instead of single-use throwaway plastic bags.
Signature picnic baskets carry sandwiches are wrapped with paper and string, along with stainless-steel tins, cutlery, glass bottles and cotton napkins, instead of all that plastic hotels would normally use.
The staff has been issued reusable, refillable aluminum water bottles, replacing the need for single-use throwaway plastic water bottles.
In addition to Angama Mara’s plastic and waste reduction, the lodge has pioneered the use of EcoBricks to curb additional waste.
The EcoBrick utilizes single-use plastic and other waste materials to create a building block that can function as a planter or as a play structure for children.
Nearly 400 EcoBricks have been made to date, eliminating roughly 100 bags of plastic garbage.
Angama Mara’s elegant and classical tented suites all boast breath-taking views and 11m wide floor-to-ceiling glass fronts.
Designed by renowned architects Silvio Rech & Lesley Carstens, and crafted by Jan Allan, Kenya’s King of Canvas, the tents perch on the edge of the Great Rift Valley overlooking the lovely Maasai Mara.
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