Conscious Travel Tips

In these times of economic strife and environmental concerns, it is no wonder that eco-tours, volunteer travel and stay-cations (staying at home during vacation time or within their borders) are becoming more popular. JTB Corp., a leading Japanese travel agency, released results of its survey on environmental awareness while traveling. According to the results, 70 percent of respondents are conscious of eco-friendly activities on their trips. There are dozens of things the average individual can do to perpetuate this green travel movement.

When browsing the tourist stations, map or brochure racks refrain from taking too many brochures. Decide which ones you truly want to know more about and leave the rest where they are for others to enjoy. When you have read the materials that you have taken with you, consider leaving them in hotel or restaurant lobbies, waiting rooms or on one of their tables to extend life of product. If, for some reason the material was ruined, be sure that you do place them into the recycling system - it only becomes trash when we send it in the landfill.

Many hotels offer personal products in little baskets throughout their rooms. If you do consume some of these, take the container with you if there is anything left in it that is still useful, because the staff has to throw out anything that has been opened, even if it is barely used. In fact, some fancier hotels are obligated to remove the items whether they were used or not! So in this situation it may be wise to take them and donate them to a homeless shelter, where people can benefit from the smaller sized containers.

Those plastic cups in hotel rooms are both reusable and recyclable… however, you can easily prevent this waste by bringing a reusable cup with you. That same reusable cup can prevent a lot of take out drink containers from ending up at the landfill during any road trip.

Be sure to ask questions when traveling, such as whether the restaurant has environmentally friendly take out food containers & purchase local food or does the hotel use recycled content in their products, if there is in-house recycling available for guests, whether their restaurant employs organic recycling programs, or whether you can rent a hybrid car instead of a regular gas guzzler.

These kinds of questions will lead businesses to make more conscious purchases because they see their patrons interested in supporting this movement towards positive change.

By: write 2 right

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~ Written by Lillian Brummet; co-author of Trash Talk, author of Towards Understanding and co-author of Purple Snowflake Marketing (www.brummet.ca)