From China to landfill — how the in-room freebie became a globally toxic menace
What’s your view on the hotel slipper? Must-have luxury accessory or the wearable equivalent of the plastic straw: a single-use item that spends a moment on your feet and an eternity in landfill? A Sunday Times investigation has followed the journey of hundreds of millions of disposable slippers from the factories of the Far East to the garbage dumps of the world’s beauty spots, pausing only to provide a few hours of comfort on the feet of the hotel guest.
The scale of the problem is huge: with a length of 29.5cm each, if you took every slipper thrown away by just the top 100 hotels in London in a year and laid them end to end, you’d have a line stretching from Hyde Park Corner to Frankfurt. London, it should be noted, has more than 1,500 hotels.
If you’re wearing a pair now, they probably came from the Hangji High-tech Industrial Development Zone in Yangzhou in China’s Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai.
With annual sales of £3 billion, this three-square-mile estate of production lines, showrooms and offices on the banks of the Mangdao River — a tributary of the Yangtze — is where almost every shower cap, amenity kit and throwaway slipper in the global hotel trade is made.
The most basic slippers, known as non-woven disposables, start at 5p a pair. They have a 100 per cent polypropylene upper and a sole made from ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), the same foam used to make yoga mats and cheap boogie boards. Typically the slippers come in a non-recyclable plastic wrapping.
Four and five-star hotels are more likely to offer slippers with a fleece upper made from polyester on an EVA sole and priced at about 30p a pair. These too are designed to be worn once and discarded. Those that aren’t incinerated are dumped in landfill.
Research cited by Nike, which uses the same material to make trainers, reveals that EVA can take up to 1,000 years to degrade, which means that the slippers you wear for a couple of nights this summer will still be around in 3026.
The lifespan of a slipper beyond the hotel room
A 2022 report in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health points out that EVA never really disappears. It breaks down into micro and nanoplastics that are carried by the leachate — or drainage from landfill — into groundwater.
From here it can easily be absorbed by plants or consumed by marine species, thereby entering the food chain — so by the 31st century, someone might be eating your slippers.
Millions of pairs end up in landfill
There’s no reliable estimate of the global number of slippers going into incinerators or landfill per year, but crunching the numbers over a smaller area gives a snapshot of the scale of the problem. Take, for example, the top 100 hotels in each of London, Paris, Barcelona, New York and Shanghai — all four and five star-rated properties as listed by the booking engine Five Star Alliance. These 500 properties total 101,642 rooms and suites. With double occupancy, the starting figure is therefore about 203,000 pairs of slippers.
Based on an average length of stay of two nights, and market research suggesting that 50 per cent of guests take slippers home, that leaves 1.5 million pairs going into landfill or incinerators every month, adding up to 18 million pairs per year. Based on an average of 120g per pair, that’s 2,160 tonnes per year — from just 500 hotels.
Germany's International University of Applied Sciences estimates that high-end hotels in the US discard approximately 10.5 million pairs of slippers every month (or 126 million pairs a year). If the 10.5 million pairs were laid end to end in a single row they’d form a line 3,554 miles long stretching from New York to London with a few pairs to spare.
Slippers aren’t just a luxury
The hospitality industry has defended their provision not only because slippers are an expected luxury, but also on health and safety grounds. So-called slip-and-fall incidents are the leading cause of public liability claims in the global hotel industry, leading to compensation of between £6,000 and £45,000 for the most common bathroom-related injuries.
Jatinder Paul of the personal injury lawyers Irwin Mitchell said: “A hotel could in theory argue contributory negligence if a guest fell while not wearing slippers provided, but in practice it would be a weak and highly fact‑sensitive argument.”
On the other hand, if a pair of disposable slippers costing a few pence can reduce accidents in spas and bathrooms then it’s an investment rather than an expense.
Slippers impact how many stars a hotel has
AA-rated hotels in the UK are not required to supply slippers, but the Hotelstars Union, which awards standardised star ratings across Europe, lists slippers as a mandatory requirement for a five-star hotel.
The 2024 Forbes Hotel Standards suggests that “robes, slippers and sufficient towels are automatically provided” but a Forbes spokesperson said “a property may choose not to offer slippers and still achieve any of the Forbes Travel Guide star rating levels. Slippers are not a mandatory requirement.” The Sunday Times asked Hotelstars Union to confirm that slippers were a mandatory requirement, and if it had plans to change this stipulation, but it did not respond.
Even if you don’t wear the slippers, they may still end up in the bin. How many times have you come back to your room to find the turn-down staff have left a pair on the foot mat at the side of your bed? They’ve done so because that’s what it says in the hotel industry’s standard operating procedure manual, and, once unwrapped, slippers must be discarded.
There are other options
But just because slippers are mandatory doesn’t mean they have to be disposable. In 2020 Accor, which operates 5,800 hotels across 45 brands ranging from Ibis to Fairmont and Raffles, was disposing of more than 200 million pieces of single use plastics (SUPs) — including slippers — a year.
By 2025, 88 per cent of those properties had replaced SUPs with sustainable alternatives.
The Accor Group own hotels including Raffles Singapore and has moved to replace single-use plastics with alternatives
Six Senses, which is owned by the InterContinental Hotels Group plc (IHG), now offers reusable slippers made from felt.
Six Senses operates 27 hotels worldwide, such as Yao Noi in southern Thailand
They’re made by the Slovenian manufacturer Kaaita from recycled plastic bottles and sold at a wholesale price of £4.25 a pair, which is 85 times more expensive than a pair of the cheapest disposables.
Scarlet Hotel, Cornwall, operates a bring-your-own slippers and flip-flops policy
There are no slippers at the luxury, adults-only Scarlet Hotel at Mawgan Porth in north Cornwall. The property asks “that guests bring their own flip-flops or sliders as single use footwear can be harmful to the environment”, adding “we do now have flip-flops made from recycled rubber available to borrow from the spa if you have forgotten yours”.
Cotswold country house Thyme places pairs of Crocs in the room, while in Amsterdam the Waldorf Astoria, the Hotel Jakarta and the Van der Valk chain offer slippers made from cork by the Portuguese designers Primal Soles — wholesale price £2.59 a pair.
(Getty Images)
Other hotel groups seem to have dragged their feet. Mandarin Oriental claims to be offering reusable footwear in some rooms but declined to comment when asked for details. Marriott and Hilton only agreed to set SUP reduction goals after the activist investment fund Green Century, which owned enough shares in each to influence their boards, applied pressure in 2024.
When The Sunday Times asked for updates on their progress, the two hotel giants also declined to comment.
In February the EU introduced the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) — specifically targeting the hospitality sector to curb the rising tide of plastic waste. It puts more pressure on European hoteliers to do the right thing but, outside the EU, it will be business as usual.
How to make your voice heard
Ultimately, the most effective way to reduce the amount of single-use footwear is to refuse to wear it. Even those of us who can’t afford the high-cost sustainability of the Mandarin Oriental or the Six Senses have options.
You could ask the hotel to remove disposable slippers from the room, or, as I’ve seen in hotels from Delhi to Puerto Rico, place them in the corridor outside. Best of all, though, is to bring your own and send the message to hoteliers that we’re done with wearing landfill.
Source: Sunday Times
