Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

When you’re planning on poking around the Antarctic, everything is an extreme, including the carbon emissions and offsets, and the impact of waste, its treatment and disposal.

The National Science Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) took a bunch of journalists to the US base station in Antarctica to give them a first-hand view of how things work.

The highlights of the insights they gained:-

Carbon emissions per person for a 2-week trip with travel from Washington DC to Christchurch, NZ and then to McMurdo Station, Antarctica and back = 25 tons (offsets required for 25 tons = 639 tree seedlings grown for 10 years)

Twenty countries run 40 year-round research stations in the Antarctic. Over 1000 staff stay at McMurdo Station in summer and a few hundred in winter.

Everyone is required to carry pee bottles while visiting senstive areas so as to leave no trace, and clean the bottles personally afterwards.

Raw sewage was dumped into coastal waters from 1957 until 2003. A sewage treatment plant was set up at McMurdo Station in 2003 for treating human waste and gray water.

Human waste from the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is buried in the ice sheet, which moves an average of 30 ft/year. Today’s human waste will eventually end up in the Southern Ocean. 

The research and gains for science have been invaluable, but then, so is the Antarctic. On balance, I’d prefer to believe the earth is flat and inhabitable, rather than letting scientists run-amok.

The Ocean Lakes Campground in Myrtle Beach, SC has dedicated a truck and manpower to haul its waste to a local recycling facility.

Not that its a dazzling innovation in eco-friendly camping, but when someone goes out of their way to be more environmentally responsible, its a notable thing.

Especially so because Ocean Lakes was the first campground in the area to do it.

The waste truck is part of their ‘iCare’ program, for which Ocean Lakes won the 2009-2010 Plan-It Green Award from the National Association of RV Parks & Campgrounds.

Their 20-yard rear loader garbage truck has already delivered eight tons to the recycling facility since January.

Also in January, the campground mounted a solar panel on the roof of an existing bathhouse to heat the water for the 12 shower stalls and the sinks.

Campers are asked to use the iCare kit to pick up after their pets in order to reduce pet pollution, which can be harmful to the ocean and marine life.

Barb Krumm from the Ocean Lakes Family Campground says “Personally, I have recycled for years, but to see how the recyclables are processed really helps you understand… why you should remove all bottle caps and never mix plastic bags in with the other recyclables.”

For more information, visit www.oceanlakes.com.

The question at hand is: if I’m an environmentally conscious traveler, should I stay at a Hilton or a Marriott? Just to remind you that the idea here is that as a traveler, you wield an considerable amount of power with your wallet, so how should you use that power if you want to choose based on environmental issues?

(Before I get into the meat of this post, let me offer a disclaimer. I cannot possibly know all of the environmental initiatives and programs going on at each hotel. I also cannot measure what the hotels’ baselines are in terms of energy use, water use, pollution, etc. I cannot tell you whether one hotel has followed through on their environmental initiatives and the other hasn’t. I wish all that data were available at my fingertips, but it’s not. Until we have a lodging certification system that allows for consistent audits across all properties, we’ll never be able to measure hotels accurately against one another.

Well, you might ask: what do you know? What I know is what Hilton and Marriott have published on their website–their public commitments to environmental values and programs. I have to take them at their word that they are executing these programs, and I have to assume that we, the public, will hold them accountable. I would suggest that if you stay in a Marriott or a Hilton, ask about these programs and what the location you’re staying in has done with regard to them.

And please check out Hilton and Marriott’s webpages on environmental programs and stewardship on your own. See if you agree with my judgment.

Hilton
So, what is Hilton doing? Here is a boiled-down list of their main environmental initiatives.

• Nearly every Hilton hotel (including Hilton, Hilton Garden, DoubleTree, Hampton Inn, and Homewood Suites) participates in the “Green Program”–which means that guests are given the option of reusing towels. Apparently, this program saves 12 million gallons of fresh water annually.
• Hilton says that it implemented a “corporate-wide” initiative to retrofit rooms with CFL lightbulbs - reducing room wattage from 750 to 220 Watts. It’s unclear, though, how many rooms have been retrofitted, though, and from the numbers, it’s obvious that it does not incorporate every hotel–or even nearly that number.
• Hilton seems to have explored how an individual hotel’s recycling program could work and printed their findings in corporate manuals, but there is no mandate for any hotel manager to implement this program. Also, they are currently EXAMINING in-room recycling options (no action yet on the corporate level).
• The hotel chain has instituted HER (Hilton Environmental Reporting) system, which seems to be a piece of software that allows managers to benchmark their environmental performance and report to corporate. This system was instituted in 2004 and none of the information has been made public in any comprehensive way.
• In the UK and Ireland, Hilton Hotels get 100% of their electricity from renewable sources.
• In the UK and Ireland, Hilton initiated a 15,000-person strong task force to tackle environmental issues, which they say led to 780 specific actions. Unfortunately, none of these actions are named.
• In September 2003, 400 Hilton hotels across the world participated in Environmental Action Month, where each of the local branches did something to ameliorate its environmental impact, and they published examples on their website.
• In November, Hilton Garden Hotels (a subset of Hiltons) announced that they would be phasing out use of styrofoam cups in favor of paper and corn based “ecotainers.” They’re compostable, which begs the question: has Hilton instituted a composting program?
• Way back in the late 1990s, Hilton conducted an energy reduction program in 14 of their European hotels and since then “several more hotels were given the go-ahead for audit and improvement programmes.”

Bottom Line: In North America, Hilton’s main approach has been to allow individual properties and managers to take action on environmental issues if they so choose. It’s nice that they reuse linens and save freshwater, but there’s a lot more that can be done. The UK and Europe seem to be taking more action, but on the whole, count me unimpressed.

Marriott
What is Marriott doing about the environment? We saw earlier in the week that they have a high opinion of their efforts thus far, while also acknowledging there is a lot left to do:

• They have a BUZZWORD! ECHO (Environmentally Conscious Hospitality Operators) is the name they’ve given to their green initiatives.
• Headquarters Initiatives: they’ve replaced plastic utensils with spudware, given premium parking spaces to hybrid drivers, and made reusable mugs available. This feels pretty week.
• Their energy- and water-efficient laundry facility in Washington D.C. serves six locations and saves 3.5 million gallons of water annually just on its own! (Compared to 12 million gallons for Hilton’s whole towel reuse program.)
• They’re building the first LEED-certified hotel in Baltimore, a Fairfield Inn that will open in 2009. They built the chain’s first LEED-certified hotel in Adelphi, Maryland.
• The company has led a whole smorgasbord of energy- and resource-saving initiatives, including: replacing 4,500 outdoor signs with LED displays, replacing 450,000 light-bulbs with CFLs in 2006, saving 11-17 percent on their water usage through linen reuse programs, and installing 400,000 low-flow shower heads (which each save 10% on hot water use per year)
• 96% of Marriott’s hotels recycle in some form. Of course, there’s no quantification here, but it’s an area they say they’re working on. We’ll see.
• Most impressively, Marriott is a member of the EPA’s Climate Leaders program, and they’ve committed to reducing their energy use 6% per guest room in the period from 2005 to 2010. This is a modest but quantifiable step toward reducing energy use.
• Marriott has received more EnergySTAR labels than any other company (160) and for this, won the EPA’s 2007 Energy Star “Sustained Excellence” award.

Bottom Line: Many of Marriott’s environmental initiatives also rely on the actions of local property managers. However, Marriott has created incentive systems to award and highlight managers for their environmental iniatives. And on a corporate level, they are taking MEASURABLE steps toward reducing their energy and water use. Next step: waste reduction. We’ll see how they do there.

The winnner is… MARRIOTT

The result here isn’t in doubt. If you want to make the Hilton/Marriott decision based on environmental factors, choose Marriott. Based on the information available, there is no doubt in my mind that Marriott has more active and committed programs to reduce their environmental impact. They’ve also worked to earn many more EPA endorsements for their efforts than Hilton. To be frank, though, I’d like to see both of these chains take a more integrated approach to their environmental impact.

Have you had an experience at a Marriott or Hilton that you’d like to share? Please comment or send us an e-mail at simplegreenchoices@gmail.com.

Recently, the Marriott Corporation initiated a program of reducing waste at the company’s headquarters. It announced the new initiative by blasting a press release out on America Recycles Day to take advantage of the publicity opportunity, and then Bill Marriott blogged about it. The initiative consists of the company eliminating the use of styrofoam and plastic utensils and switching to biodegradable products, as well as offering their employees reusable mugs and 30 parking places reserved for those who drive Hybrid vehicles. Changes like this are certainly welcome and a good start, but when a hotel chain institutes these kinds of changes at their headquarters, the obvious reaction is: “What about the hotels?”

Apparently, we’re not the only one who asks these questions. Just about every comment on Bill Marriott’s blog touches on the same issue–why are the lights on when nobody’s in the rooms? why keep the rooms chilled to what seems like 55 degrees Fahrenheit? why not switch to Spudware in the hotels? I think if this were the end of the story, the verdict would be clear: Marriott would be guilty of greenwashing.

However, that isn’t the end of the story. Marriott seems to be taking slow but steady steps toward moving to a more sustainable model. A promotional video they posted on YouTube also has a short take on their sustainability efforts. It’s not perfect, certainly, but it’s something that should be encouraged and applauded in an industry that has been slow to change.

The company’s long-term sustainability goals were recently documented in the Washington Post. According to this article, Marriott’s changes will eventually trickle down to all of their hotels, and in the meantime, they have tried to take to take more modest measures at the hotel level. The CFO, Arne Sorenson, who acts as a co-chairman on the company’s “green council” readily admits that “We still have a big environmental footprint. We don’t know what it is but we know it’s significant.”

Here at Simple Green Choices, we would much rather see executives frankly discuss the serious changes that still need to be made than resting on their laurels after executing mediocre plans of bandaids and greenwashing. Marriott has the potential to make a big impact by integrating environmental practices into everything they do, but it’s going to take courage and vision on the part of the corporate leadership. If they can succeed in winning over more guests through their efforts, though, it will certainly push the rest of the industry to follow suit.

If there’s anyone I’m disappointed with in this story, it’s the Washington Post. The article on Marriott displayed serious signs of lazy reporting. Here’s a chance for the newspaper to dig a bit deeper and get at the heart of environmental practices in hotels. Where’s the interview with Hilton? Embassy Suites? Holiday Inn? W Hotels? What’s best practice in the industry?

Well, we’re not reporters, but we’re willing to do a bit of research. Tune back in here tomorrow for the Chain Hotels Eco-Challenge: Hilton vs. Marriott.

By now, the environmental sins of bottled water have been well-documented. Bottled water is a luxury good in the developed world, where we can drink water that’s just as good (if not better) right out of the tap. Plus, only about one-fourth of the plastic bottles that we consume in this country actually get recycled. And the petroleum that we use to produce the PET bottle plastics is derived from petroleum.

All in all, plastics are a dirty material, mainly because they never biodegrade, so unless we recycle it, the plastic we produce could well fester in a landfill or float on the surface of the ocean for generations… possibly forever. Charles Moore is well known for his research on the floating plastic in the oceans, mainly because he found a persistent area of floating plastic the size of Texas out in the North Pacific Ocean.

The bottom line? We need to find ways to curb our consumption of plastic, and unfortunately, one of the times we feel we can’t avoid consuming beverages in plastic bottles is when we’re traveling. Here are a couple of tricks to avoid plastic bottles entirely:

1) When flying, bring an empty plastic bottle or Nalgene through security and fill it up at a water fountain inside security. As long as you’re not transporting any liquids at all, you are unlikely to run afoul of security. Aluminium bottles are an even more stylish choice of container.

2) When traveling to a country where you can’t drink the water straight out of the tap, consider bringing a purifying system instead of drinking bottled water. Obviously, this is more practical in Russia than, say, Bangladesh, but if you bring your MSR purification system (a filter alone is not sufficient to kill viruses - for that you need chlorine), you should be able to make the drinking water potable in most situations. Consult the manufacturer to confirm that your choice of purification systems kills all the local critters you’ll be exposed to.

(Thanks to the folks at Lonely Planet for this second tip!)

Whereas the environmental impact of transportation is fairly clear-cut, other travel decisions can be significantly more fuzzy. Lodging is a good example. What is it that makes a hotel environmentally friendly? Sure, it’s great to give guests the option of reusing towels, but what else should hotels be doing to minimize their impact? And how can you pick a hotel that is genuinely minimizing their environmental impact?

The first thing to look for is whether a hotel in your destination has been certified by a Green Lodging organization. Although there is not a universal standard for hotel certification, there are several smaller organizations that certify hotels on a regional basis. Below are a few of the organizations to try first:

• Green Globe (International)
• Terra Choice (U.S. and Canada)
• Green Seal (U.S. only)
• Rainforest Alliance (Caribbean and Latin America)
• Orbitz (Mostly domestic)

Once you’ve exhausted these organizations, you have a couple of options. First of all, you could try booking hotel chains that have made a public commitment to environmental practices, such as Hilton. Motel 6 has even professed to be “born-again” green, but as with all non-certified properties, you should ask what they are really doing beyond the bare minimum to reduce their energy and waste streams.

Finally, your last resort is to book your lodging independently and do your own research. “Research” means calling your top contenders and asking some hard questions. In an interview with MSN, Ronald Sanabria, the director of sustainable tourism for the Rainforest Alliance in Costa Rica, suggests the following questions:

How does your property contribute to the local community?

• What is your property doing to conserve energy and water?
• What does your property do to minimize waste and its impact on the community?
• How does your property promote sustainable travel?

Finally, if you’re staying in a lodge that claims to be an eco-tourist retreat and is located in an environmentally important or sensitive area, it’s especially important that you do your due diligence and make sure that they’re living up to their “eco-tourist” label, because if they don’t, they may be doing serious damage to the ecosystem and the local communities. ResponsibleTravel.com has a list of 10 additional questions to ask, including how many locals (including guides) the facility employs and what education programs they have on local ecology and culture, among others.