One Bottle at a Time: Initiative to reduce plastic on holidays
Charlie supports every initiative for sustainable travel
Charlie is a big fan of every project that helps protect the oceans, fights single use plastic and stops people from trashing waves. As a surfer, that’s what she cares about, and she supports volunteer projects such as Surfers Against Sewage.
What makes Charlie very happy is to see that also tour operators are getting on board and start forming initiatives: One Bottle at a Time (OBaaT) is a forum to share best practices across the travel industry and was recently founded by Selective Asia, The Experience Travel Group, Holiday Architects, Pura Aventura, Steppes Travel and Wild Frontiers. Those tour operators have made it their mission to provide their guests with clean drinking water that doesn’t come in a plastic bottle. They hand out reusable aluminium bottles at the beginning of the trip and provide water in canisters or refill stations.
“Selective Asia had worked for several years to try and eliminate single use plastic water bottles from our holidays in Asia with varying degrees of success. The logistics are challenging and we realised that we needed to work across the industry with like-minded companies and get our clients on-board to really scale-up, meet our ambitious targets and make a global difference to our planet’s future. With this in mind, in 2019 we came together as a collective to share, learn and define best practise before promoting the initiative to the others in the industry.”
(OBaaT Spokesperson Nick Pulley, Selective Asia)
What difference does it make?
The Experience Travel Group has done the maths: Based on their experience that every traveller uses on average 56 water bottles during a 2-week trip, they estimate that by providing reusable bottles and clean water, they can save 90000 bottles a year. The aim is to grow the initiative to 100 tour operators by the end of 2020.
This way destinations such as Borneo, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bali and Laos will hopefully soon be plastic free and projects like Surfers Against Sewage have at least 90000 bottles less to pick up from the beaches of this world.
If you are more like Charlie and you explore the world on your own, you can always find the nearest water station at refilltheworld.com
Charlie also recommends to use the Water-To-Go bottle, it doesn’t keep the water chilled as an aluminium bottle does, but it allows you to filter your water wherever you are and eliminates 99% of harmful contaminants. (And Charlie has a 15% discount for you, if you order your bottle here.)
Top image: OBaat via TravMedia.com
