Jake Kheel of Puntacana Resort on Being a Luxury Ecotourism Trailblazer

The resort places a focus on luxury. But isn't there a tension between luxury and sustainability?

In what we're trying to do here, that is not the case. When you mention eco-tourism, people tend to have an association of that with living in a treehouse, using a compost toilet. Our idea is you can have both an amazing spa treatment, golfing, horseback riding, and go to the coral reef. We see that ecological sustainability is good for the local community. Excess doesn't have to destroy the environment.

There are concrete things that you can do that destroy your business but don't destroy the environment. We've found that high-end experiences can be even better for the environment than other types.

How does your clientele tend to respond to your efforts?

For the homeowners and tourists here, this adds a level of value for them, and creates an interest for them in this place that's hard for anyone else to duplicate, either in the Dominican Republic or in other countries. You're in a place that's pretty well protected, so that distinguishes us in a way. Most guests are very enthusiastic and very positive. Over the past four years here there's been a sea change when it comes to working on the environment. There's more enthusiasm for green products and green activities. The reaction is always really positive. But a lot of people come here and don't even see all the stuff we're doing. One of our challenges is to get much better at promoting ourselves.

What role should a resort -- and what role does Puntacana -- play in dictating environmental awareness to guests?

I find that when it comes to interest in the environment, people approach it in different ways and do different things. For instance, we produce organic vegetables. Some people are into buying locally produced organic vegetables and that's their way of interacting. There are some people who love the stuff we're doing on the reef. Some love hearing about the recycling program, or other homeowners love hearing about our community work in clinics and schools. There's a grab bag of what people will take to. I've rarely met people who have said, "I'm just not interested in any of that."

As an environmentalist, you have to be a tragic optimist, committed to idea that people are going to come around on this stuff and things will get better. There are some pretty bad examples but some pretty hopeful things happening as well.

For example, Mikhail Baryshnikov swims laps in the oceans by the reef for exercise. So he's very interested in the reef. He did an art exhibit down here and donated the proceeds to our reef restoration program.

At the highest levels, like Oscar de la Renta and Julio Iglacias, these are sophisticated types of people who are into different things and see the value of this. They might not come and give a huge donation, but they're there at board meetings to support this stuff.

And Oscar was one of the early people who got us started in beekeeping. He had bees that infiltrated his bathroom in his house. When we set up the apiary here, he set up a bee colony at his house so he could show his guests.

What programs haven't been so successful at Puntacana?

As management, you identify what the biggest problem is and try to solve that big problem. But that doesn't gel with what people are willing to do, what they get most excited about. We did a program with students from the University of Miami, who came down to do a mapping of the coast and figure out where the fish species were and what were the impacts were from land based development and fishing, and map all of that to make management decisions. It was a pretty sophisticated way to do marine management.

We wanted to keep extending the project up the coast and get other hotels on board. What we found out was that people were enthusiastic about it but weren't willing to invest. But when we started looking at garbage, it isn't related to marine life, but it bothers everybody. We didn't realize that within our company and in the community and in the other hotels that there would be more enthusiasm for garbage than there was for coral reefs.

But you take what you can get. The lesson being that you can't do environmental management in a closed space, you have to include people, you have to do things based on what people are interested in doing.

Can you talk about this sanitation project?

As far as I know, there were no sanitary landfills on the island. The specialized liner, the method for capturing methane gas, that required doesn't exist in the Dominican Republic as far as i know. Instead, they use old abandoned mines. Someone charges you to take your garbage there. In the worst case scenario, it gets dumped in a field or a dumping site.

Not only is the end result not good environmentally and on a health level, but the costs of doing that were high. There was a monopoly. The waste company could say that costs were going up 10 percent. And finally, the quality of the service wasn't very good.

So we wanted to find another way to manage our garbage that was better, more cost effective, that doesn't contribute to environmental degredation. We did a study into how we move our garbage, what we're producing, what kind of garbage we produced -- glass metals, plastic , cardboard whatever -- looked at garbage from the airport, airplanes, how it changes depending on where the airplane comes from.

How do we avoid sending garbage to the dump? It started with the airport, which produces a huge amount of garbage. Federal regulation requires you to burn waste coming off an international airplane. But in each country there's a different division of the government that oversees this quarentine. And they will recognize that some of those things don't burn well at all, and give you permission to do something different.

We got an agreement from the government and set up a recycling center, and bought a state of the art incinerator so that whatever we can't separate and sell, we incinerate. That allows us to recycle between 45 to 50 percent of the airport's waste.

Then we built the recycling center to take waste from our property too. We're also taking trash from other hotels, restaurants and homes.

The other thing we've started doing is once you're taking out the recyclables you've got a lot of organic waste. We're still trying to figure that out. For now, we give it to the pig farms in the area. Some of it is still going to the landfill, but we're also doing projects with worm composting, vermiculture, to create a high value organic waste compost.

We're also working on a feasibility study for a bio-digester, which is a hermetically sealed container that processes organic waste and turns it into a different gas, mostly methane, and you can also get different composts out of that too. You can use the methane for cooking fuel, or for a small scale generator.

Are these projects rubbing off on other hotels?

What wev'e done is we've made other companies enthusiastic about it. We've tried to promote this to everyone -- not just tourism but everybody can figure out a way to handle their garbage better.

Travel and tourism is different from other industries. You’re not manufacturing some widget and sending it to some far away place. The place is the product. The way you bring people and educate them, that’s an esential part of tourism. Sustainability is inherent to tourism. Whether the tourism industry recognizes that or not, that’s another story

It's getting harder to get away with it with information technology, the internet and certification systems. I went to a conference, and someone said that greenwashing is actually really good, but only if you get caught doing it. Because if you get caught, then you have to go the extra mile to prove you are green. There are various certifications, but I think that the companies that are really commited to sustainabiliy and are committed to it will stand out on their own. And it can't just be about image. Then you're only going to do the least amount possible and only do a superficial job of it. It has to also be about good business.

Take Wal Mart. For a long time, people said, how can they possibly be green, they're greenwashing. But merely by saying, "we're going to sell x milion compact florescent lightbulbs," and stocking them and putting them in the high value area of their stores, they far exceeded their targets. They said no longer are incandescent light bulbs going to be a viable way to do business.

People can critique Wal Mart in all different ways but they made a huge impact on the market. Their impact in terms of energy and carbon savings was not just a symbolic gesture. They said, "we're going to drive inefficient light bulbs out of business." That also has a huge impact in terms of operations. They're basically saying, "we're not only going to make our business more efficient, but make the whole industry more efficient."

On the other hand, you have projects like the one Ford did with [Bill McDonough] to create a green production plant. But that green production plant still turned out very gas guzzling, anti-environment cars. It didn't effect operations, or the way the market works. Their defense of course is that nobody wanted to buy a small car. That's kind of the difference. Wal Mart said we're going to do it in operations so that it's not just a symbolic thing. It's deep.

When you mention eco tourism, people tend to have an association of that with living in a treehouse, using a compost toilet. Our idea is you can have both an amazing spa treatment, golfing, horseback riding, and go to the coral reef. We see that ecological susustainablity is good for the local community. Excess doesn’t have to destroy the enviornment.

Eight years ago we decided we'd become less of a mass scale tourism company and more of a real estate company. The types of people who come here, we decided, would be different, and the things they wanted would be different. We would create a low density area with good privacy. People would come to a place in which they would be investing in building a home, buying a property. That would have less impact on the land. We would build less for higher value. That has had a positive environmental impact for us in terms of the amount of food we had to bring in, the garbage we created.

In mass-tourism all-inclusive resorts, you have massive amounts of people coming, needing lots of food, lots of energy. That's hard to do we decided.

Tourism has to move in a way so that people can still enjoy traveling, but their impact has to be less. Tourism has to be more local. The way you get there is important, and the impact you have on the place is important.

Travel and tourism is different from other industries. You're not manufacturing some widget and sending it to some far away place. The place is the product. The way you bring people and educate them, that's an essential part of tourism. Sustainability is inherent to tourism. Whether the tourism industry recognizes that or not, that's another story.

Imagine you're the emperor of the Punta Cana area -- or of the whole Dominican Republic. What would you do?

What's lacking now is a really good, socially-inclusive planning process. It's the classic tragedy of the commons. There's this attitude of, "There's really nice land in Punta Cana, let's buy it, build my hotel out as it suits me." There's no relationship to what already exists. The roads are chaotic. The water systems are individualized at each hotel. Everybody is designing water systems to their own needs. Garbage doesn't get thought about in an integrated way. The way you use energy isn't systematically considered.

We're working on what's called a plan de ordinamento, a master planning process that will govern not only where to build but how to build, where to move people, how to transport people. That exercise could have major environmental consequences. That whole thing makes the region much more ssustainable over time, more competitive, more attractive to get people to come here. That we've done a good job of that for our property influences the hotel association and encourages the government to do it too. We're trying to send the message that when you have a jewel of a place like this, you have to be careful you don't destroy it.

Disclosure: I recently participated in a New York Times Institute conference hosted by the foundation, in partnership with Columbia University.
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