Green Initiatives:ECOCARE

Our Mission Statement East West Destination Hospitality is committed to reducing environmental impacts by engaging our associations, owners, guests and community through the use of responsible products and sustainable practices.

At East West, we feel privileged to work and live in this beautiful Colorado mountain paradise and are dedicated to preserving it for generations to come. Our desire to respect our natural surroundings helps create a better environment of our guests, our employees, the community and the land. East West has established an EcoCare Team, comprised of representatives from each property we manage, that is responsible for coordinating and implementing new sustainable initiatives. Through our efforts, we hope to inspire others to mirror our practices as it makes sense environmentally, socially as well as financially. We hope you’ll appreciate what we’re doing in the properties we manage as well as what individual unit owners have implemented.

OUR COMMITMENT TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND OUR COMMUNITY

• Easy-to-use Single Stream Recycling areas
• Recycled paper products used as much as possible; double-sided printing and copying; Email confirmations and communication
• All properties are 100% nonsmoking
• Compact fluorescent lighting on building exteriors and common areas
• Housekeeping products are citric acid-based and free of dye, fragrance, toxic chemicals; laundry products are phosphate-free and biodegradable
• Natural Dry Cleaning processes
• Incentives to employees to use alternative transportation
• Paid time off for employees to volunteer for community and environmental programs such as Habitat for Humanity, Highway Clean-Up and Salvation Army Adopt-A-Family/Food Drives.
• Memberships: Vail Valley Partnership – Destination Preservation and Eagle Valley Alliance for Sustainability

ECOFACTS

• The EPA estimates that 75 percent of what Americans throw in the trash could actually be recycled.
• The national recycling rate of 30 percent saves the equivalent of more than five billion gallons of gasoline, reducing dependence on foreign oil by 114 million barrels.
• Recycling 35 percent of our trash reduces global warming emissions equivalent to taking 36 millions cars off the road.
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours – or the equivalent of half a gallon of gasoline.
• More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product and Americans use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum cans every year.
• Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every three months.
• To produce each Sunday’s newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
• The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood and other products made from trees.
• Approximately 1 billion trees’ worth of paper is thrown away every year in the U.S.
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures each year.
• Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic beverage bottles every hour.
• Recycling plastic saves twice the energy as burning it in an incinerator.
• The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours.
• A modern glass bottle would take 4,000 years or more to decompose – and even longer if it’s in the landfill.