Conference on Environmental Science and Technology

Tourism is a crucial industry for the global and domestic Greek economy that applies environmental pressure through various services such as accommodation, food and waste management. Τhere is an urgent need for the hospitality sector to be more sustainable according to the European Union and the UN World Tourism Organization. This study proposes a methodology for the calculation of the carbon footprint of a hotel by considering its energy consumption, the hotel's kitchen propane gas consumption, hotel waste and food waste. For the implementation of the proposed methodology, a 5-star hotel resort in Northern Greece was used as a pilot. The calculations emphasized that its energy consumption is responsible for the greater share of CO2 emissions/ guest night, contributing for 81%, followed by emissions from waste and food waste, with 5% and 11 % each, and with PG kitchen operations producing the lowest share of emissions with 3%. Understanding the allocation of carbon footprint across different hotel sectors is important for reducing environmental impacts through the development of sustainable scenarios and practices. Different scenarios were proposed as more sustainable practices and showed a significant reduction in the overall CO2 emissions by adding Renewable Energy Sources in the energy consumption, composting and increasing recycling in the waste management of the hotel. Combining these solutions could lead to a reduction of 47.45% of hotel emissions.