Rooms with a Future
What do you do with 110 metric tons of scrap wood resulting from a hotel room redesign? Easy: You use it to make new furniture for the same rooms. This was the approach followed by Motel One in Munich, and the result was a one-of-a-kind pilot project implemented in a partnership with Pfleiderer and Zollikofer.
“The hotel industry has already made sustainability part of the practices it uses in operational work areas such as power delivery and consumption, room cleaning, and the use of organic food,” says Motel One Group CR & Sustainability Manager Verena Ferner. “However, recycling furniture and interior finishing elements is an unprecedented step towards greater sustainability in our sector.”
Sustainable stays
The Motel One hotel chain was founded in 2000 and currently operates 99 hotels with 27,928 rooms in 13 countries. These affordable boutique hotels are some of the most successful in Europe, and social responsibility and sustainable practices both play a vital role in this: The chain uses green electricity exclusively, its generous breakfast offerings include plenty of organic food options and vegetarian and vegan alternatives. Short shipping and transportation routes and high energy efficiency are given priority, and the company’s fleet is gradually being converted to electric vehicles. In short, one thing is crystal clear: Motel One is serious about sustainability – which makes it a role model for the entire industry.
Back into the supply chain
A team of 18 experts is in charge of sustainability in all areas at the designer boutique hotel chain. When it comes to interior design, that increasingly means analyzing the lifecycles of all products from beginning to end and continuously moving all processes from a linear to a circular economy model. This is why the company decided to test a “reverse logistics” approach for the first time ever at its Motel One Munich-Deutsches Museum. So what does that entail specifically? Easy: Old headboards, storage drawers, and built-in closets from hotel rooms are fed back into the supply chain as a secondary raw material. In this specific case, the scrap wood even went to the same companies that had originally delivered the boards in the first place. “We’ve been working with Pfleiderer engineered wood materials for a long time now,” Verena Ferner explains. “And when we asked them, they recommended Zollikofer as an additional partner for the project.”
An all-around success
Zollikofer is active in wood trade and logistics and is part of the Koehler Group. The know-how offered by these scrap wood processing experts helped Motel One establish a raw material loop with scrap wood for the first time ever. “Obviously, that doesn’t mean that we were able to reuse the same exact batch of scrap wood that we gave Zollikofer, since there is a delay in all this, but the net outcome is that everything ends up in the same loop,” the Motel One Sustainability Manager explains.
We all benefit when we use our resources in loops.
Group CR & Sustainability Manager
Verena Ferner
Verena Ferner has worked at Motel One since 2014, where she has been the Group CR & Sustainability Manager since 2019.
About two years before renovation work started, Stefan Zollikofer paid a visit to conduct an on-site inspection. During his visit, he used a sample room as a basis to determine exactly which furniture would be suitable for recycling. In December 2023, the redesign process started, and Zollikofer gradually collected the old furniture with its own trucks. The contents were then sorted by hand at the processing yard before being taken into the processing plant, where the wood was first checked to make sure it was chemically suitable. After that, it was broken down into wood chips.
of scrap wood were recycled for the Motel One Munich-Deutsches Museum redesign and reused in the hotel’s rooms.
Picking up scrap wood directly where it was generated was a new experience for us. And to tell you the truth, we loved that direct contact.
Zollikofer Managing Director
Using its own truck, Zollikofer delivered the wood chips to Pfleiderer, where their moisture context and chemical suitability were analyzed. In addition, the processing plant removed ferrous and nonferrous metals from the chips, after which an AI-assisted radiographic inspection was combined with infrared scanning to remove any remaining impurities. Once these steps had been completed, the wood chips had the same quality as fresh wood and could finally be turned into raw chipboard panels before being coated.
is the recycling rate of the boards purchased by Motel One from Pfleiderer.
Motel One was the first customer we’ve ever had that really wanted to know the ins and outs of what would happen to their secondary raw materials, and wanted to reuse them.
Head of Product and Marketing Communication, Pfleiderer
After six months, the redesign process for the Motel One next to the Deutsches Museum in Munich was completed. All headboards, storage boxes, closets, and other fixtures such as wardrobes were reused. “We normally renovate rooms every five or six years,” Verena Ferner explains. “But we’re trying to extend this interval to ten years in order to improve sustainability.” At the time of writing, Motel One is still evaluating the results from the pilot project, but there's a good chance that this scrap wood recycling will continue.
rooms were renovated between December 2023 and April 2024 while the hotel remained open.
