Q&A: Tan-Wee Wei Ling, Pan Pacific Hotels
As Pan Pacific Hotels Group doubles down on improving its environmental efforts worldwide, the company’s Executive Director of Sustainability Partnerships, Lifestyle and Asset explains how biophilic design and green initiatives are becoming key touchpoints across its portfolio.
How would you describe Pan Pacific’s approach to sustainability?
Sustainability is one of our key pillars and our commitment as a company. It is our responsibility to reduce our impact on the environment, especially with Pan Pacific Hotels Group’s growth across the world. We work towards including sustainability across our business, from operations to design. We believe that everybody, whether guests or employees, has a role to play and can bring positive change for the environment.
Tell us about the sustainability initiatives the group has introduced…
We have launched many initiatives and are constantly developing new efforts. These include introducing solar panels at our PARKROYAL COLLECTION hotels in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur; banning single-use plastics for F&B, meetings and guestrooms in almost all our Singapore properties – something we are rolling globally; and replacing plastic water bottles with filtered water taps and glass bottles in guestrooms, which saves more than half a million plastic water bottles a year in total. In addition, our large outdoor Urban Farm at PARKROYAL COLLECTION Marina Bay features more than 60 types of greens, offering 20% of fresh produce for our farm-to-table, farm-to-bar and farm-to-spa concepts – the farm’s contribution to infusions at St Gregory spa helps craft a lifestyle experience for guests. Finally, we are testing food waste digesters at several hotels that can turn food waste into greywater, which is then safely released into the sewer system.
How does this feed into the design of Pan Pacific hotels worldwide?
We are known for our hotels’ biophilic designs; in Singapore for instance, PARKROYAL COLLECTION Pickering comprises 15,000m2 of high-rise gardens, while PARKROYAL COLLECTION Marina Bay is home to more than 2,400 trees and shrubs. And for the upcoming Pan Pacific Orchard next year – Singapore’s next low-waste icon – four levels of sky gardens will be filled with plants and trees covering over 300% of hotel’s land area.
In Kuala Lumpur meanwhile, the new PARKROYAL COLLECTION – our first outside of Singapore – boasts 78 sky planters and roof terraces with 13,000ft² of plants and trees. We aim to spread our eco-friendly efforts across all of our brands and continue to look at how to design more sustainable hotels as we grow worldwide.
What can guests expect from low-waste hotel, Pan Pacific Orchard?
Located in an iconic building in Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping belt, Pan Pacific Orchard will comprise four levels of gardens, each with a unique setting: Forest Terrace, Beach Club, Secret Garden and Cloud Terrace. The hotel will also have green technologies like a food waste digester to convert food waste into filtered water for cleaning, while its wellness experience at St Gregory spa will be set amidst nature.
Where is Pan Pacific’s sustainability strategy headed in the long term?
We look to the UN Sustainability Development Goals to drive our strategy, as well as the Singapore government’s roadmap to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. This includes milestones like achieving international hotel sustainability certification by 2025, and reduction of emissions by 2030. By following these roadmaps for our entire portfolio, we can chart the future success of our sustainability push, working closely with government agencies, partners and our parent company UOL Group Limited to achieve our goals. We are also focusing on testing new technologies in our Singapore properties first before rolling out globally, piloting things like a food waste artificial intelligence (AI) system that could show us more insight on food wastage in our restaurants and therefore help us to make better purchasing decisions.
