Say Goodbye To Tiny Shampoo Bottles In New York Hotels

One of the little perks of staying in a hotel used to be the little shampoo bottles that you would be able to take home with you.  Hopefully you have a stockpile of them.

When we were little, we used to love staying in hotel rooms.  It felt like an adventure.  They had a little fridge in there (even though we weren't ever allowed to eat or drink the snacks in it), if we were lucky there was HBO, and normally my parents tried to find ones with pools in them.  Plus, when we left we would always have enough shampoo and soap to last us until the end of the trip.

How many bottles of shampoo do you have in your house?

If you are one of those people who always does a quick scan of the hotel room before you leave and you grab up all the little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash on your way out, you can expect that to go away in 2025.

There is a new amendment to the environmental conservation law that will prohibit hotels in New York that have fewer than 50 rooms to distribute the small bottles anymore.   These bills passed through the State Assembly and Senate and are becoming laws in 2025.

This had already become a law for large hotels with more than 50 rooms and now they're expanding it to include all hotels.

Why do they need this to become a law?

The goal is to reduce plastic pollution.  Americans use over 500 million full size bottles of shampoo every year.  Those are bottles that end up in landfills and take hundreds of years to decompose because of the material that is needed to hold the shampoo.  Now imagine how many of those tiny bottles there are and how many will end up there.

What could you use instead?

Now, environmentalists are encouraging people to use a shampoo bar.  It's just like a bar of soap, only instead of regular soap it creates shampoo for your hair.  It doesn't contain harmful packaging and simply disappears as you use it.