How Berlin is making tourism sustainable

No matter how much you talk about sustainability and tourism, at the Lulu Guldsmeden Hotel in Berlin you can do something about it.

The Lulu Guldsmeden Hotel is one of the most sustainable hotels in Berlin – you are constantly reminded of this every time you visit. But the only thing that makes you pause is the sign at the breakfast buffet.

It lists the previous day’s food waste per visitor.

And it works, says General Manager Nick Zilinski.

“Our guests read the notices and pay attention to the garbage,” he says. “You can see a change in behavior.”

Berlin visitors show “great interest” in sustainability

The German capital has been taking sustainability seriously for years, long before it became a tourism buzzword. In 2017, it adopted a plan to develop diverse attractions and promote sustainable tourism. Since then, the city has won awards for its sustainability program and advised other cities on their sustainability efforts.

Luisa Mentz, sustainability manager at Visit Berlin, says the first visitors who were interested in sustainability were people who came to the city for conferences or incentive trips – and their travel manager asked about it. Environmental friendliness was one item on their checklist.

But recently that has changed.

Some visitors today are looking for a more sustainable holiday experience and are therefore careful before planning their trip. They check the environmental credentials of a destination. They review its sustainability plans. And they plan more environmentally friendly activities such as cycling or city walks.

“There are groups out there that are very interested in sustainability,” she says. “One of our goals is to reach them with our message.”

One of the beneficiaries of Berlin’s sustainability initiatives is the Lulu Guldsmeden, which is part of a boutique hotel chain.

Zilinski, the general manager of Guldsmeden in Berlin, says the idea is to set an example for guests and other hotels of how sustainable they can be. The hotel does everything you would expect from an eco-friendly hotel. It recycles food waste, sources its produce locally and has eliminated single-use plastic.

But the hotel goes further and constantly reminds its guests that they have a certain responsibility. A particular highlight is a sign that greets all guests upon check-in and reminds them of what a sustainable tourist should do. This includes eating local produce, using biodegradable products and recycling.

This may seem obvious, but travel has rarely been given responsibility for sustainability. And in an unusual place. Berlin has made huge progress: from a divided and somewhat desolate city during the Cold War, to a huge construction site in the late 1990s, to one of Europe’s greenest capitals.

Urban gardens are flourishing in Berlin

Berlin is a future-oriented city. There are display cases on sustainability on every corner and there is even a museum dedicated to the topic.

Inés Lauber, a tour guide who specializes in Berlin’s urban gardens, says the city faced a difficult decision after reunification nearly 30 years ago. Should it hand over the empty spaces to developers? Or should it preserve some of them as parks and green spaces?

And although many of the open spaces were created for the capital, some of them have amazingly been preserved. One of the largest is the former Tempelhof Airport, where a new urban community called Allmende Kontor is being built between the now-abandoned runways.

“People come together as a community and these gardens have become very much a community project,” she says. “They are sustainable, but people actually grow and harvest food here.”

On a recent summer afternoon, the harvest is plentiful. Peppers, pumpkins and mint sprout in neat rows, and green tomatoes begin to ripen. And in the open, bushes grow, bending under the weight of blackberries. It’s not what you’d expect in Berlin, but it’s an essential part of the city’s sustainability picture.

What does the future of sustainability look like in Berlin?

Berlin is one of the few major cities with a future museum, the Futurium. It is a relatively new museum concept that encourages visitors to look to the future rather than the past. Sustainability is the focus.

“We are looking at different approaches to how the future could be shaped,” says museum director Stefan Brandt.

In the Futurium, for example, these could be art exhibitions that use connecting lines to show the relationship between the environment and people. This could be an exhibition with robots that interact with each other. Or an exhibition that shows a path from an unsustainable to a sustainable future.

What is special about the Futurium are the open spaces in which museum guests can sit and discuss what they have seen, perhaps developing new ideas to solve the world’s future problems.

For visitors to Berlin, the Futurium is a must. In a city where guests are often so fixated on the past, looking into the future is a contradictory experience. Berlin hopes you will find sustainability there.