A tribute to Luke Cole

I'd like to get back to some constructive tips in the tourism and travel industries in my next post, but I wanted to take a break to cross post this great contribution on DailyKos today about the pioneer of environmental justice law. It's worth a read in it's entirety here for several reasons, including the tie in between environmentalism and civil rights.

Wag of the finger

So I have been doing a lot of travelling lately and I thought I would post two quick observations. Both airlines and hotels have very easy opportunities to recycle and conserve that they miss. First, when airlines come around and collect trash, with the exception of newspapers, airlines simply don't recycle, and many airlines don't even recycle newspapers. How many times do they comes through the aisles at the end of the flight asking you one more time if you have any trash? Are you telling me ONE of those times can't be an attendant coming through with recycling? The implementation would be virtually as easy as the idea. They make one of those trash bins at the front or back of the airplane recycling instead. When they reach the ground the recycling is carried away to a central airport location where recycling is collected. It would be hard to imagine that most airport locations don't have recycling available. Sure they might have to expand their capacity for taking in and transporting that recycling. But what's the worst that could happen, you give a few people a job?

Next, hotels miss obvious opportunities to conserve. First, it should be policy not to collect trash cans with virtually no trash in them. Stop thinking you are doing me a favor and being extra nice by taking my trash from the room when there are 2 pieces of garbage in there! Next, cleaning staff seem to be trained to simply to throw the plastic trash bags into a larger plastic trash bag and move on. That's an enormous watse of oil-based plastic material, and as we know, extraorinarily damaging to the environment. Solution- dump the trash into the big trash bag and unless there is something fowl enough to stink up the room or make the othe rbag unusable- leave the trash bag in there at least until that person checks out.

Two little things about conserving in the travel and tourism business. More to come...