Waste Reduction while Travelling

As I type this, I am sitting at the Calgary airport at 7:19am, on my way to Denver for a work conference. This is the second of three work trips I will be taking this month. As mentioned, I was in Banff last weekend for a work conference, Denver this weekend (on election day!), and a three-day meeting in Canmore next weekend. It's a busy, busy time for me.

I wanted to touch on a few things to try to reduce the waste impact while we travel. Specifically, I have been thinking about the impact of staying in hotels and eating a lot of meals out.


Here are a few things I do to try to cut back on the waste created by my trip:

• Put up the Do Not Disturb sign. If I'm staying in a hotel for less than a week, I see no reason to have my room cleaned or my bed made. Typically, rooms come stocked with more than enough towels to make it through my stay, and if I only change my sheets once a week at home, I don't think I need them changed more often in a hotel. So I put up the "Privacy Please" sign and just keep the room to myself. This cuts back on unnecessary garbage bags, cleaning supplies, and toiletry wastage.
• Bring my own toiletries. I used to have a bad habit of collecting all of those miniature shampoos and conditioners they give you in hotel rooms. In fact, I still have a big supply of tiny bottles to use up in my bathroom at home. Now I just bring my own toiletries at home, which I think are better quality anyway. If I can get away with it without being spotted, I will sneak the toiletries from my room back onto the cleaner's cart so that I know they won't go to waste. If not, I just move them out of the bathroom so they won't get all wet and ugly, and hope that they hotel staff will re-use them for the next guest. Putting up the Do Not Disturb sign helps prevent more of these toiletries from appearing.
• Manage my garbage bag usage. Garbage bag wastage really bothers me. The thought of plastic bags whose sole purpose is just to sit in a landfill just eats at me a little bit. If the garbage bins in my room don't have bags in them, I will use them. If they have bins, I will often take my garbage out of my room to a public bin, which will be emptied anyway. That makes one less wasted garbage bag.
• Take my recycling home. I never really know the recycling polices of hotels that I stay at, as they are rarely blatantly advertised. If I have room in my luggage, I will just bring my recyclables home with me (plastics, paper) and put them in my own blue bin.
• Reduce food waste. It can be hard to reduce the waste from meals when I can't do any cooking and have little access to grocery stores. Where possible, I will eat whole fruit for breakfast, and sit-down meals instead of take-out. Often when I am travelling with work the meals are catered, so it is a bit easier to manage waste for those meals.
• Avoid eating and drinking on airplanes. Airplanes are the worst! Even your soda has to be put in a plastic cup for some reason. Usually if my flight is reasonably short, I just refuse anything given out on airplanes to avoid all the plastic waste.

I admit that it's not always easy to reduce waste while we travel. I do my best, but I'm not perfect. Sometimes if I'm travelling alone, I don't really want to sit by myself in a restaurant, so I eat take-out. And sometimes I just get lazy like everyone else.

Do you have any waste-reduction tips for travellers? Leave a comment!