Independent research into Sri Lanka’s hospitality sector challenges the most common assumption about why hotels struggle with plastic — and points to what the industry actually needs next.

For years, the conventional wisdom about hospitality and plastic has been simple. Hotels would cut their single-use plastic, the thinking goes, if only it weren’t so expensive. Cost is the wall that good intentions can’t climb.
New independent research suggests that story is wrong.
A study we were glad to support
When a master’s student at the University of Agder chose to study the barriers hotels face in moving away from single-use plastic — and to test the case for a standard like the Zero Plastic Commitment — we didn’t commission the work. We simply supported it. That distinction matters to us, because the value of research lies in its independence, and the findings are far more useful precisely because they weren’t ours to shape.
Stefanie Fausel set out to answer three honest questions. Does the hospitality sector genuinely need a credible zero-plastic standard? Is there real appetite for one? And what actually delays hotels from adopting a standard that is independently verified? Her research focused on the hospitality sector in Sri Lanka’s Southern Province, combining a broad survey of around 147 hospitality businesses with in-depth interviews and an on-the-ground assessment of fifteen hotels against the Zero Plastic Commitment criteria.
Why this matters now
The timing could hardly be sharper. From 27 September 2026, the European Union’s new rules on environmental claims take effect, and unverified terms such as “sustainable,” “plastic-free” and “eco-friendly” will no longer stand without independent substantiation. At the same time, the UN Tourism Global Tourism Plastics Initiative is calling on tourism businesses to eliminate problematic single-use plastic and to report publicly on their progress.
For a hotel that markets itself to international travellers, the direction from every side is unmistakable. It is no longer enough to say you are sustainable. You have to be able to prove it. The era of the self-declared green claim is closing, and the era of verified commitment is opening in its place.
What the research found
The first and most striking finding is that the willingness is already there. Nearly every hotel studied wanted to reduce its single-use plastic, the great majority had management support behind the effort, and most were already measuring their plastic use in some form. This is not a sector that needs to be convinced that plastic is a problem. It already knows.
The barrier, in other words, is not motivation. Nor, contrary to the conventional wisdom, is it simply cost. Cost was certainly the concern hotels mentioned most often — but the research found that how expensive a hotel believed alternatives to be had no clear bearing on whether it was willing to act. No single barrier, on its own, determined whether a business moved forward. Instead, the obstacles were structural and interconnected: supply chains that deliver almost everything pre-wrapped in plastic, limited access to proven alternatives, lingering concerns about hygiene and quality, weak signals from customers, and recycling infrastructure and enforcement that remain patchy.
There was also a revealing gap between intention and readiness. Although nearly every hotel was willing to act, only two of the fifteen assessed were formally ready to certify at the first level of the standard. The difference came down not to effort but to formal systems — a written reduction plan, proper records, a designated person who owns the work, a relationship with a recycler. Most hotels had the foundation. What they lacked was the structure to turn good intentions into verifiable results.
Perhaps the most important insight came from the researcher’s own conclusion, drawn from her background in sustainability assessment. A certification scheme, she observed, can either reward leaders — handing a badge to those already at the finish line — or it can support learners, guiding businesses along the path. For a sector like this one, where willingness is high but formal capacity is still developing, the second model is the one that works.
Why we built the standard this way
That conclusion is, in effect, a description of how the Zero Plastic Commitment Standard was designed.
ZPC is built around reduction first. Rather than rewarding hotels for recycling whatever plastic they use, it asks them to refuse and reduce single-use plastic at the source, treating recovery as the option of last resort for what genuinely cannot yet be avoided. It begins with an accessible entry point — an “Engaged” stage that formalises what many hotels are already doing — and moves through clearly defined levels of verified progress, rather than demanding perfection on day one.
And, crucially, every stage is independently verified by Control Union, one of the world’s largest third-party certification bodies, operating in more than eighty countries. That independence is not a detail. In an era of tightening rules on green claims, verification by a trusted external body is the difference between a commitment the market believes and a logo anyone could print. The research surfaced exactly this scepticism toward self-declared schemes — and exactly this appetite for something credible.
The real headline: the appetite is already here
It would be easy to read “only two of fifteen hotels were ready” as discouraging. We read it as the opposite.
When nearly every hotel already wants to do the right thing, and the thing standing in their way is the absence of a credible, supported, independently verified path to follow, then the task is clear and it is achievable. The demand for doing this properly is real, and it is larger than the industry is usually given credit for. What has been missing is not the will. It is the framework.
That is the gap the Zero Plastic Commitment exists to close — not by pressuring hotels, but by walking the journey with them, from honest measurement to results that an independent body can stand behind.
Read the research
In the spirit of the standard itself, we believe in being transparent about the evidence. The full study — conducted independently, with our support — is now available to download.
We are grateful to Stefanie Fausel for the rigour and the honesty of her work, and to the hospitality businesses across the Southern Province who took part. Read it, question it, and tell us what you think. That is how serious standards get built.
[Download the full research →]

https://www.zeroplastic.lk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Barriers-faced-by-hospitality-businesses-in-the-Southern-Province0Aof-Sri-Lanka-in-adopting-eco-friendly-alternatives-to-single-use0Aplastic-and-achieving-Level-1-of-the-ZeroPlastic-Commitment.pdf
Reduce. Rethink. Replace. Verified.