7 Ways Nghê Prana Has Been Doing Earth Day Every Day Since 2019

Today is Earth Day. The 2026 theme — "Our Power, Our Planet" — is about collective local action shifting global outcomes, which is a frame worth taking seriously. According to a 2024 Amazon Ads consumer study, 66 percent of travellers now actively seek sustainable brands when booking, up from 48 percent five years ago. The hotel industry has responded with varying degrees of honesty: some properties have made genuine structural changes, many have printed a "we reuse our towels" card and called it sustainability. The cleanest version of sustainability in hospitality is the kind you do not have to announce, because the decisions that produce it are built into the walls and the supply chain. Nghê Prana has been doing it this way since we opened on the Thu Bồn River in 2019. Here are the seven choices — not the marketing, the actual choices — that make every day here a structural Earth Day.

1. Zero Single-Use Plastic, Property-Wide

Not "mostly zero," not "we're working on it." Zero. When we built the property in 2018-2019, we audited every touchpoint a guest would encounter and removed the plastic from each one. Drinking water comes from an in-house reverse-osmosis filtration system into refillable glass bottles in every room — each room's bottle gets 5 to 8 refill cycles per guest stay, replacing what would otherwise be 8 to 12 plastic bottles per guest per stay. Toiletries (shampoo, conditioner, body wash, lotion) come in refillable ceramic dispensers, not 30 ml plastic amenity bottles. Laundry bags are cotton. Slippers are reusable. In-room amenities — tea, coffee, snacks — come in glass, ceramic, or paper. Takeaway containers from the restaurant are banana-leaf-wrapped or reusable-glass loan containers. Straws, where used, are bamboo or rice straws from a cooperative in Quảng Nam. The cumulative math over a full year, across 5 rooms averaging 80 percent occupancy: we have avoided roughly 14,000 single-use plastic items that a comparable property would have sent to the landfill. That is 1,400 items per room per year.

2. 12+ Local Farm Partnerships Within 30 km

The Corn Restaurant & Bar sources from twelve named farms within a 30-kilometre radius of Hội An. The herb gardens of Trà Quế supply the fresh turmeric, lemongrass, pandan, kaffir lime leaf, and over forty other herbs used in both our kitchen and the spa's herbal-bath blends. A rice cooperative in Điện Bàn supplies the nếp cái hoa vàng sticky rice used in our breakfast. A family duck farm in Cẩm Kim supplies eggs. A small fishing family in An Bàng supplies the line-caught mackerel and anchovy. The logistics are slower and the procurement is more complicated than a wholesale supplier would be; the payoff is a menu where every dish on the plate has a measurably short story and every family farm has a stable buyer. We have cycled through zero farm partners in seven years. The farms are still the farms.

3. River Conservation Since 2019

From opening year, Nghê Prana has funded a monthly clean-up of the stretch of Thu Bồn River the property sits on. Staff and volunteers walk and paddle a 1.2-kilometre segment of the Cẩm Nam bank, collecting plastic waste (still the dominant category, despite improvements), glass, and discarded fishing gear. Over seven years this has removed approximately 2.3 tonnes of waste from the river — a number that looks small nationally and is meaningful locally. The 1.2-kilometre stretch has demonstrably cleaner water visibility than the equivalent stretch on the Ancient Town side, which is visible to anyone who walks both. Monthly is not a marketing cadence; it is what keeps the stretch clean.

4. Monthly Animal-Release Ceremony (Phóng Sinh)

On the 14th day of each lunar month — full-moon night, the Hoi An Lantern Festival night — the property hosts a traditional Buddhist phóng sinh (animal-release) ceremony on the Thu Bồn. Fish and birds rescued from nearby markets are released into the river and sky. The practice is ancient, the ritual is monthly, and the ceremony is open to any guest staying that night. It reframes the Lantern Festival from a tourism product into a specific local tradition with a specific local meaning. We have not commercialised it. Guests who wish to join are welcome; guests who wish to watch from the terrace are equally welcome; guests who would rather spend the evening at the Ancient Town are also welcome.

5. No Staff Uniforms That Need Replacing

A minor decision with a surprisingly large footprint. Most hotels run a polyester uniform cycle that replaces front-of-house uniforms every 18 to 24 months. We chose natural-fibre (linen and cotton) uniforms hand-made by a Hội An tailor, repaired and re-hemmed annually rather than replaced. Over seven years we have commissioned 2 full uniform cycles rather than the industry-standard 4 to 5. The uniforms also look better as they age, which is a non-trivial aesthetic benefit.

6. Solar Hot Water + 28 dB(A) Air Conditioning

The rooftop solar-thermal system provides roughly 60 percent of the property's hot-water demand across the year (higher in summer, lower in the December-January cool season). The air-conditioning specification was chosen at 28 dB(A) not primarily for sustainability — we chose it for sleep quality, because louder HVAC degrades sleep — but the side effect is that each unit runs on 40 percent less energy than typical tropical resort HVAC specs. The sleep-first design choice is also the lower-footprint choice; the two usually are.

7. The Hotel Is Run by the Family That Lives in It

The most important and least-photographable of the seven. Nghê Prana is owned and run by a sister and brother who live on the property. They drink the water from the in-house filter. They eat at the restaurant. Their children played on the Cẩm Nam bank we clean monthly. This is the structural reason the sustainability choices do not read as marketing: the people making them cannot separate the hotel's environmental impact from their own household's. Every decision is made by someone who has to live inside the result.

What Earth Day Actually Asks

The 2026 Earth Day theme — Our Power, Our Planet — is pointed at exactly this: that local decisions, multiplied, produce the global outcome. A five-room hotel in Hội An does not solve climate change. What a five-room hotel can do is demonstrate that the cleanest version of sustainability in hospitality is the version that does not need a sustainability department, because the property was built, from day one, by people who cannot afford to get it wrong.

The 66 percent of travellers now looking for sustainable brands have learned to spot the difference between structural sustainability and marketed sustainability. The difference is visible in the walls, the kitchen, the staff, and the river the property sits on. Today is a good day to notice.