The Cebu City Council passed a resolution en masse to enjoin hotels and pension houses in ditching single-use toiletries and switching to bulk-size counterparts in order to reduce plastic waste and save the environment.

North District City Councilor Alvin Dizon, who sponsored the resolution, said hotels and pension houses are a huge source of single-use travel-sized miniature toiletry bottles for their shampoos, conditioners and shower gels which end up being thrown away.

“These mini bottles find their way into our landfills or clogging our drainage as they are not oftentimes recycled,” he added, further encouraging the establishments to embark on better sustainability practices.

This move, however, was disputed by the Hotels, Resorts and Restaurants Association of Cebu (HRACC), citing that this entails a larger cost from the establishments’ end.

“We support sustainable tourism, but our main challenge are the suppliers (are limited) and that it is very expensive. Once we have plenty of suppliers then it will be now affordable to go into that direction,” HRACC president Carlo Suarez said.

He did not say it couldn’t be done. “Starting green business is tough, costly and risky, but we must be prepared to make that journey, for our planet’s sake and for the sake of our future generation,” he added.

Based on World Economic Forum, at least eight million metric tons of plastic end up in the world’s ocean every year which is the same as dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute, and which by 2050 is expected to increase to four garbage trucks every minute.