Alejandro Romero Nuñez and Ramón Monteverde were growing alarmed. Alejandro is the Food and Beverage Manager for Hotel San Cristobal and Ramón is the Chef de Cuisine. As local residents of Todos Santos they were all too familiar with the fires at the town dump, so they were devastated to discover that the vast majority of Hotel San Cristóbal’s waste was being generated by their department – and sent to the dump.

They swung into action. With the support of General Manager Thelma Esquitin, Alejandro reached out to Alianza Cero Basura to help him develop a program on waste reduction and waste separation for the hotel. The results that he and his team have achieved are truly outstanding. In just 3 months they have diverted 5,180 kg of waste – that’s around 5.7 tons or 11,400 pounds of waste – away from the landfill into productive uses, including:

• 2,605 kg to a pig farm
• 2,458 kg to the hotel’s new compost farm
• 117 kg to Punto Verde for recycling

Put another way, Alejandro and his team are now diverting 56% of the hotel’s waste (roughly 2 tons per month) away from the landfill, and they continue to refine their waste reduction strategies including using refillable containers to restock their coffee from Baja Beans, which reduces by half the number of plastic bags used and discarded by the hotel.

To recognize this great achievement, on June 1, 2023 Alejandro was named an Alianza Cero Basura Agent Zero. Alejandro has proven himself an agent of change, leading the Hotel San Cristóbal team in changing the way they relate to waste. As part of this process 63 Hotel San Cristóbal employees completed Alianza Cero Basura’s Waste Separation and Management training course and were presented with awards for their achievement at the same event.

Hotel San Cristóbal sees itself as part of a larger program to transform Todos Santos into a green destination: the hotel purchased a new trash truck for the community of Todos Santos; hotel workers regularly help clean trash from the road to Punta Lobos, the popular fisherman’s beach that abuts the hotel; and they invested in Alianza Cero Basura at the Champion level so that we can help other businesses achieve similar results with their waste management strategies. They have their eyes on the prize of a zero waste future for our community – and they are proof that we can do it!