When you’re in your day-to-day routine you can easily keep up with your green practices, but there is no reason to let travel upset your green routine. When you travel, you can stick to your green practices and make sustainable choices whenever possible. Here are a few tips for green traveling that will help the planet and allow you to relax knowing that you’ve done your part.
In a wonderful letter to the editor, Randy Moorman, Community Campaigns Manager at Eco-Cycle recently broke down why reusable grocery shopping bags are in fact a better decision than recycling single-use plastic bags and we loved it. Moorman clearly poses counterarguments to a guest commentary piece that ran in a Boulder newspaper and we wanted to share his thoughts on recycling and reusable bags.
When Hermosa Beach Girl Scout Troop 3925 was looking for a community project to undertake, they found that they all agreed that disposable plastic bags are causing severe damage to the environment and sustainable options, like reusable shopping bags, are a much better choice.
Creating a custom reusable shopping bag is a great way for you to help residents go green before a bag ban is implemented effectively marketing your brand. Reusable grocery bags are a great marketing tool since they offer tons of visibility and increase your brand recognition.
Plastic bags are not very popular in Eugene, Oregon, so a recent move to ban them has not caused much of a stir. And the switch to reusable bags has found support from organizations that typically do not back plastic bag bans: grocers. More than 60 local businesses that range from mom-and-pop shops to major chains in the Eugene area have announced their support of the ban. There is still some work to be done, but in the best-case scenario, the folks of Eugene can be free from plastic bags in as little as 6 months.
Students from the small New York state town of Sleepy Hollow have some big plans. A group of middle school students in the Environmental Action Club have started a grassroots campaign to ban plastic bags and move to reusable bags in their hometown. They got the idea from the neighboring city of Rye which recently put a bag ban in place and from the movie ‘Bag It,’ a documentary about the environmental effect of plastic bags. Their efforts have attracted the attention of the mayor, Drew Fixell, who paid the club a visit to discuss the pros and cons of such a ban.
Several cities across the United States are weighing the pros and cons of banning plastic disposable bags. Austin, Texas is another city implementing such a ban in favor of reusable bags. The Austin Resource Recovery, the department handling the transition, has been working diligently on drafting and redrafting the bill to make sure they get it right. As with other cities that have passed similar bans, there is resistance and opposition to switching to reusable shopping bags, but the authorities of Austin have allowed the community to join the conversation and give feedback via public forums.
On December 19, 2011 the Seattle City Council passed a ban on plastic bags, and a short time later the mayor of Seattle, Mike McGinn, signed this bill into law. Banning plastic bags is quickly gaining momentum and similar bans have been put into place in San Francisco, CA, Portland, OR, and Brownsville, TX.