Follow these 6 simple Steps and you will be on the right side of being Eco-Friendly, when you are planning your vacations
Eco-friendly holidays are possible if you put in a little bit of planning before your making any decisions, so have a look at these six easy steps.
Green living and green modes of transport can they go together?
There is an interesting post below about eco-friendly travel, that is worth your perusal; so check it out!
Eco-Friendly Travel in Style
Image by ubrayj02 via Flickr
If you want to be an eco-friendly travel planner, you can find ways to blend jet-age convenience with responsibility to the planet.
You might be surprised at how many options you have to maintain your “home” values of eco-friendliness on the road.
Items you will need: Guidebooks
Step 1:
Select a destination with good rankings in terms of environmental protection. The editorial board at the online site Ethical Travel rates highly countries including Costa Rica, Palau, Poland, Uruguay and Dominica and others on environmental protection, based on an environmental performance index developed by centers at Yale and Columbia universities.
Step 2:
Visit your library and check out as many of the guidebooks on the shelves as you can for your destination, looking especially for books published by Lonely Planet, Moon Travel Guides, Rough Guides and Bradt Publications, or independent publishers specializing in eco-friendly travel.
Step 3:
Design a trip that allows you to “fly less, stay longer,” as recommended by off-the-beaten-track guidebook writer-publishers Tony Wheeler and Mark Ellingham. This maximizes your travel time and limits your carbon footprint, the measure of greenhouse gases you produce. In general, your green transportation choices are the ones that use fewer resources, so they tend to be less expensive as well.
Step 4:
Patronize airlines that have a strong environmental agenda; see if they recycle cabin waste and offer all-electronic ticketing. Look at the average fleet age to determine if an airline uses more fuel-efficient planes; researchers at Greenopia, a green-products rating company, annually rate airlines on this variable as well as fuel consumption practices and green building design.
Step 5:
Book a stay in a hotel or resort that follows environmentally sustainable practices such as water conservation, native plant landscaping and reduced solid waste. Hotels that adopt the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria work to follow such practices.
Step 6:
Support vendors — tour operators and cruise liners as well as airlines, hotels and resorts — that advance energy conservation, recycling and good water and air quality, recommends the American Society of Travel Agents in its “Ten Commandments on Eco-Tourism.” Whether on safari in Kenya, fishing in Alaska, hiking in Hawaii or bird watching in Brazil, examine vendors’ policies on trash disposal, vehicle or vessel fuel efficiency, and whether they “leave no trace behind” after a visit to a pristine area.
More at How to Plan Eco-Friendly Travel
These little guys here, are depending on us to start doing the right thing!
If we all play our part in keeping travel companies and organisations on their toes, it will begin to have a beneficial impact on our environment.
If you have enjoyed this article, – please sign up on the form above to keep posted – on this ever changing subject, and remember we need to encourage everybody we meet to to work at being more eco-friendly, our planet is depending on us!
Watch what you build it out of, how much land you have to degrade to build it (road to it, clinreag the land) and research the materials. How about a roof garden, solar panels or a plan to use grey water? Depending on what you choose and what kind of life you have and money to spend, it might be more eco friendly to just live in a house that has already been built near where you work etc, and just try to buy energy efficient appliances, new windows, etc.