Amglow taps into hotel sector’s growing thirst for sustainable water

With Singapore’s push towards embracing The Hotel Sustainability Roadmap where one of the targets includes having 60% of hotel room stock in Singapore attaining internationally-recognised hotel sustainability certification by 2025, one such company that is eager to support this push is Amglow.

The local hydrotechnology startup sells water filtration systems and co-founder & CEO Amglow, George Lim, stumbled upon this business in 2019 because of a personal pain point. He was looking for water filtration system providers for his parents’ home, and found that the existing options in the market were not very affordable and customisable. That motivated him to create his own solution, travelling to Taiwan to secure components to assemble his product, without the help of external funding.

What started as a consumer product business eventually transformed to an enterprise product business, after he discovered that there was a strong need for his product among hospitality brands. Today, enterprise clients' contracts make up the bulk of Amglow’s revenue.

Amglow serves 17 hospitality clients, from international hotel chains such as Parkroyal Collection Marina Bay, The Fullerton Hotel Singapore, and Swissotel Singapore, to local hotel chains such as Hotel 81 and Fragrance Hotel.

Amglow has successfully installed their tech-enabled water filtration systems in 8,000 hotel rooms, eliminating some 16,000 plastic bottles a day for local hotels, saving about 5.84 million plastic bottles a year.

Lim shared that according to a 2023 report by think-tank United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, Singapore is the world’s largest consumer of bottled water.

“If we could reduce or even eliminate some of the wastage here, it will go a long way in making the industry more environmentally friendly. Some prominent hospitality brands have ditched single-used plastic bottles or are in the process of doing so.

“The government is also doing its part via the Business Improvement Fund where the Singapore Tourism Board will consider supporting the implementation of sustainability solutions in hotels by up to 70%. Many of Amglow’s customers have made use of this grant to switch to our water filtration system in their rooms, doing away with plastic bottled mineral water completely.”

Each hotel is unique and has its own characteristics and design ethos. Instead of offering a few standard products, Amglow approaches hospitality clients by understanding the features they want to offer their guests and how the product can fit seamlessly with the overall design of the guestroom.

Some hotels require a very specific type of gold colour for their filter faucet, some want a taller filter faucet to fit with their top mount basin, while others want a separate drip tray just to cater to the filter faucet. Amglow also provides filtered hot and cold water on demand, and in some cases even sparkling water.

“Our internal forecasts put us on target to almost double our number of guestrooms served to 15,000 guestrooms by the end of 2023. Single-use plastic bottles will not be commonplace for most hotels in the near future. We are also in talks with several hospitality brands regionally, in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand. In the near future, you should be able to see Amglow’s water filtration systems when you vacation in these countries,” said Lim.