The BeMed Business Club does not only work remotely! Twice a year, the business members, the scientific committee and the founding NGOs are invited to meet face-to-face. After discovering the L’Occitane en Provence factory in Manosque in July 2022, the end-of-year meeting marked the return to the InterContinental Marseille – Hotel Dieu where we had launched the first pilot project of the Business Club in June 2021.
The day dedicated to the restitution and sharing of the results of this project “towards a zero plastic single use hotel” was the highlight of the meeting, in which many stakeholders were able to participate.
Demonstrating by example that reducing single-use plastics can save money, unite staff around a project and maintain or even increase the quality of customer service, is a message of hope. In order to disseminate it, a press conference was organised in the presence of Mrs Anne Claudius Petit, President of the Commission for Energy Transition, Waste Strategy and Air Quality of the Southern Region. Find all the results in this article.
The Business Club does not stop there, with prospects for adapting the project in the Tunisian hotel La Badira, and the implementation, in 2023, of a diffusion on the scale of the Mediterranean basin.
The meeting also provided an opportunity to reflect on the theme of his next project: mass distribution, retail and supermarkets. At the end of a collaborative workshop, three singular approaches were discussed, which could nonetheless easily come together to form an ambitious project with an impact. Will shopping centres be transformed into third places, with users at the heart of the process? In any case, the participants sketched out such perspectives, which need to be consolidated and refined, in France and in Morocco, for a transnational approach.
The reunion in Marseille also provided an opportunity to meet local players such as Super Cafoutch, the cooperative supermarket in Marseille, or the Calanques National Park, during a guided and immersive visit to discover the canyons of the Mediterranean. And it was finally under a rainy weather (not taking anything away from the conviviality of the meeting) that for the first time, the Tunisian members were welcomed!
