These items are banned in NY hotels in 2025 with hefty fines for rule breakers

NYC hotel rooms won’t be quite so small anymore.As of Jan.

1, Albany has banned single-use plastic bottles for soaps, shampoos and other toiletry products that are under 12 ounces — in an attempt to decrease plastic waste.Any accommodation with 50 or more rooms — anywhere in New York State — is subject to the new rules, but as of 2026, the regulations will expand to all hotels, motels or other hostelries with less than 50 rooms, according to The Department of Environmental Conservation.Establishments that violate the new law will receive a warning and 30 days to correct it.Upon a second violation, the hotel will face a fine of $250, followed by a $500 penalty if found in violation in the subsequent 30 day period.“A person staying at a hotel may use a small plastic bottle for shampoo once, possibly twice to wash their hair and then that bottle quickly becomes waste,” Christy Leavitt, the plastics campaign director at the nonprofit Oceana, previously told Scripps News, adding that “an estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the oceans every year.”“Multiply that by thousands, tens of thousands, of people who stay in hotels each night and that’s a lot of plastic waste.”When the act — which was delayed after lobbyists argued that hotels should use up their stockpile 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 amenities program, switching from small toiletry bottles to larger, pump-topped bottles as part of our commitment to reduce plastic waste,” a spokesperson for Marriott Hotels told Fox News at the time, adding that the company had already reached “95% compliance” globally by the close of 2023.According to Eric A.

Goldstein, the senior attorney and NYC environment director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, reducing the use of these plastics is “vital in the fight against climate crisis,” he pr...