Hospitality combines the elements of sustainability from both manufacturing and service industries. Hence a sustainable practitioner in these disciplines operates from a systems view of processes, combined with behaviour change opportunities.

A rewriting of the programme document for the National Diploma in Hospitality (Management) (Level 5), for example, has seen explicit statement of sustainable graduate profile: 

Graduates will have an awareness of sustainability issues in the hospitality industry and will be able to apply principles in practice.

Sustainability will be integrated into the delivery of the programmes and will be modelled directly for students by the behaviour and attitude of teaching staff. Thus teaching staff must use resources responsibly in the classroom and in their personal work.

Several specific areas of sustainability have been identified for the both awards:

• Demonstrating a continuing commitment to best practice through stressing those hospitality methodologies that have been found to be most efficient and productive for example reducing power outputs, using seasonal products, composting waste and reducing washable linen usage.

• Using local products where available and coffee that is roasted in New Zealand

• Demonstrating a commitment to and encouraging students to consider the advantages of recycling and using environmentally friendly products

• Increasing provision of materials to students on-line rather than in hard copy

• Maintaining intellectual currency in the discipline

• Encouraging the construction of professional networks and support structures

• Encouraging ownership and responsibility. Students need to realise that social sustainability is the result of everyone’s actions, and each of us must consider the impact we are having. Students will at times be making choices and decisions on their own (rather than simply taking instruction from staff), and will see the outcomes of these decisions, both good and bad. They can experience this in a safe and controlled academic environment. When they are then faced with similar decisions in the “real world”, they will better understand the causal relationship between their behaviour and the state of their communities.

This last outcome is significant in representing the impact sustainability is having on the institution.  A year ago, in response to the chainsaw analogy – suitably modified to unsustainable fish stock – was met with ‘in the kitchen you do what you are told, the best we could hope for is that graduates would hold onto that knowledge for a few years until they are in a supervisory position’.  Now, even within the acknowledged hierarchical structures of the kitchen, there is recognition of personal responsibility.

• A greater practical ability within the department to implement changes towards sustainability
• Using large bokashi bins for recycling
• Increased use of locally produced goods
• Increased education of suppliers etc
• Sustainable practitioner profiles already explicit in programme documents
• Teaching ‘three Rs’ within programmes
• Sustainability a regular item on agenda at meetings

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