Michael Bayley, Royal Caribbean International’s chief executive and president, told TTG that the company had already started reducing its consumption of straws, and said the company was committed to working towards eradicating plastic overall.
“We’ve already formed a team to look at the elimination of plastic for RCCL ships,” he said. “The team has been working on it for the last few months and it was discussed at an executive level including myself, [chairman] Richard Fain and [Celebrity Cruises’ president] Lisa Lutoff-Perlo two weeks ago.
“We’re going to bring in more people and the team’s first job will be how to bring this aim [of eradicating plastic] to life.”
Bayley revealed that there were two phases to the plan – firstly looking at the removal of plastic from the ships, “for example plastic straws, containers, stirrers.”
The second phase he said, was “to look at the plastics used in the design and construction of the ships”.
He added that the RCCL fleet had already changed its policy on straws – “if you want a straw onboard now, you have to ask for it. We don’t want to be giving them out automatically. It’s something we started a few months ago.
“We want to be at the front of our sector in eliminating plastic,” Bayley added. “We don’t want plastic in our oceans”.
