The Delta Hotels by Marriott, Dubai Investment Park has partnered with Airowater to convert H2O from the air into drinking water for guests. Rose Dykins reports

The Delta Hotels by Marriott, Dubai Investment Park has partnered with Airowater to transform humidity from the air into drinking water for hotel guests.

The Marriott property is the first hotel in the Middle East to collaborated with Airowater, an Indian air purifier tech company that has developed Atmospheric Water Generators (AWG). Airowater now has AWG manufacturing sites in both India and the UAE.

Airowater’s AWGs were created to tackle issues related to drinking water around the world, such as lack of access to clean water, water shortages and excess plastic used in producing bottled water.

The Marriott hotel – which offers free bottled water for guests as standard – currently has two Airowater AWG units installed, which produce between 500 and 1,000 litres of water each day. This is enough to cover all of the property’s drinking water requirements.

The hotel’s 246 guestrooms, restaurants, meeting facilities, spa and gym all have refrigerators stocked with filtered Airowater glass bottles. The property is proudly plastic-free in terms of water bottles, which are not used in any of its public or staff areas, including it’s back-of-house offices.

Compared to other water harvesting methods – such as desalination or reverse osmosis (RO) water systems – an advantage of Airowater’s AWG technology is the fact there is no wastage of water. The hotel also says it saves approximately 11,000kg of plastic for every 1,000-litre AWG installed.

Raja Zeidan, multi-property general manager of Delta Hotels by Marriott, Dubai Investment Park and the St. Regis Downtown Dubai, says: “We are very satisfied with the results so far. All of us in hospitality need to focus more on sustainability and look for solutions together to eliminate plastic bottles in our properties.

“The consideration of how we use water, and the containers in which water is stored, is a good starting point. However, we plan to invest a lot of time and energy into sustainable initiatives for the future of our hotels.”

Over the past 30 years, the water table in the Middle East has declined by about one metre per year, putting the UAE on track to run out of its natural freshwater resources in just 50 years. This collaboration between the Delta Hotels by Marriott, Dubai Investment Park and Airowater could help inform other hotel’s sustainability initiatives, as well as providing a much-needed solution for tackling global water shortages

by Rose Dykins | GLOBETRENDER