These items are banned from NY hotels in 2025 – with hefty fines for violators

NYC hotel rooms won’t be so small anymore.

Since January. 1, Albany has banned single-use plastic bottles for soaps, shampoos and other toiletries that are under 12 ounces — in an effort to reduce plastic waste.

Any lodging with 50 or more rooms — anywhere in New York State — is subject to the new rules, but starting in 2026, the regulations will expand to all hotels, motels or other inns with fewer than 50 rooms, according to Department of the Environment. Conservation.

Institutions that violate the new law will receive a warning and 30 days to correct it.

With a second violation, the hotel will face a $250 fine, followed by a $500 fine if found in violation in the subsequent 30-day period.

“A person staying in a hotel might use a small plastic shampoo bottle once, maybe twice to wash their hair, and then that bottle quickly turns into trash,” Christy Leavitt, director of the plastic campaign at nonprofit Oceana, previously adding to Scripps News. that “about 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the oceans each year.”

“Multiply that by thousands, tens of thousands of people staying in hotels every night and that’s a lot of plastic waste.”

When the act — which was delayed after lobbyists argued that hotels should use their stockpiles of single-use plastic bottles — was first announced last year, major hotel chains had already taken steps to go green.

“We have long been focused on our residential appliance programme, moving from small toilet bottles to larger, pump-filled bottles as part of our commitment to reduce plastic waste,” said a spokesperson for Marriott Hotels to Fox News at the time, adding that. the company had already achieved “95% compliance” globally by the end of 2023.

According to Eric A. Goldstein, senior attorney and NYC environmental director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, reducing the use of these plastics is “vital in the fight against the climate crisis,” he previously said in a statement about the bill. .

“This new law addresses the ever-growing problem of plastic waste and will prevent tens of millions of plastic bottles from becoming a waste burden in New York each year,” he said.

California has already banned single-use plastic toilet bottles in hotels and similar accommodations. Meanwhile, Washington state signed a similar bill into law that would ban single-use plastic bottles in hotels starting in 2027.

“Each of these single-use plastics that we can take action on has an impact,” Leavitt told Scripps.