As I posted recently, I have been checking out The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen. It’s a very handy paperback book filled with helpful and (most importantly) EASY tips to save energy, reduce waste, and generally act more responsibly.

This week I thought I’d share some of my favorites from their Travel chapter. They have all kinds of suggestions for planning your trip, getting there, staying at a hotel, sightseeing and eating out. There are a bunch of things in there that I hadn’t really thought much about, and some which are just worth repeating. Here are my top 5 from this chapter:

1. Linens. Use the same linens and towels in your hotel room throughout your stay.  The average hotel room consumers more than 200 gallons of water per DAY, or as much as your entire household typically uses in a day. Trimming the amount of water used by washing sheets and towels can save up to 40 percent of a hotel’s water use.
2. Suitcases. Pack lightly – every additional ten pounds per traveler requires and additional 350 million (!!) gallons of jet fuel per year, which is enough to keep a 747 flying continuously for ten years. As a serial over-packer – that one hit home for me!
3. Guidebooks. Research your travel online and print out only the pages you’ll need to reference. You’ll save time, money and paper waste. More than 800,000 travel books go to waste every year!
4. Toiletries. Pack your own shampoo, soap and toothpaste instead of relying on the ones provided by most hotels (and of course then you can pack your favorite Garden Girl products!). You’ll get the product you want and you’ll creaste less plastic waste. A single 300 room hotel in Las Vegas uses more than 150,000 plastic bottles of shampoo per year.
5. Water bottles. Use and refill as single (preferable stainless steel or BPA-free plastic) water bottle when you travel. The average person in the United States drinks 8 oz. of bottled water per day (how did that ever happen??). It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to annually satisfy America’s demand for bottled water (the bottles for which are derived from petroleum). If that oil were converted to gasoline, the total could fuel 500,000 station wagons to take their families on coast-to-coast road trips. Considering the ongoing and unspeakable tragedy in the Gulf, we need to do whatever we can to reduce this country’s insatiable appetite for petroleum. And drinking from a reusable bottle is an easy way to start.

Let me know if you have any favorite eco-friendly travel tips – I’d love to hear them! Happy trails!

Huh. I just read this blog entry from BlogHer about BPA in Sigg water bottles. Depressing. Yep – it seems that any of their uber-cool “eco” (and very expensive, I might add) water bottles that were produced before August 2008 have been leaching BPA. Apparently, they never claimed to be “BPA free” but they always said that BPA didn’t leach into the water. Come to find out, they weren’t being truthful. Not only that, they somewhat sneakily replaced the liner they were using in August of 2008 with one that really is BPA free – trying to fly under the radar.

So here’s the scoop – if you have a Sigg water bottle from before August 2008, you might want to consider using it as a vase instead. To get more details on the difference between the two liners – the old “bad” one and the new, BPA- and phthalate-free one – check out the BlogHer blog posting for pictures that show the difference between the two liners so you can see which one you have.

To be safe, always choose an unlined stainless steel bottle, a water bottle that states it is 100% BPA-free or even an HDPE #2 plastic bottle (not ideal, but not bad). And don’t forget, try to avoid the individual bottles of water (like Dasani, Poland Springs etc) if at all possible. Save those for times when you are in a bind and don’t have access to a refillable bottle. (see related post on how bottled water sales have declined – yea!!)

It sounds as though Americans are finally coming to their senses. Sales of bottled water are on the decline for the first time in 5 years. Looking back it seems like such a sign of the “go go go” years when the economy was humming along at such a nice pace, everything was all about convenience (without much thought about the overall impact left behind) and there were big efforts to reduce the amounts of soda consumed and go healthy by drinking more water. We thought we were doing the right thing – by drinking more water we and our kids will be better off. But in the meantime, only 10% of the bottles (yes TEN percent – yipes) were getting recycled (source: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation). That’s a lot of waste – especially considering the fact that the growth in sales of bottled water was skyrocketing – “Sales of bottled water swelled 59 percent to $5.1 billion between 2003 to 2008, making it one of the fastest growing beverages.” (Source: Washington Post article)

But now, it looks as though the tides have turned. The Washington Post reported recently that “sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers, who have discovered that tap water is practically free.” Duh – really, what were we thinking? Is it that hard to get a reusable bottle and fill it up from the tap? Especially since we now start hearing that brands like Coke’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina are just tap water (Check out this CNN article). It really does make you realize how easily we can be swayed. And it does seem pretty silly, doesn’t it?

I, of course, say this all as someone who includes herself in the “duped” category. We would buy our cases of bottled water at Costco before we went on vacation or for parties or sometimes just to have around the house. And I’m not suggesting that there is no need for them at all – it’s just that we need to recognize that it is wasteful to use them and they should be saved for very specific uses – not “just to have.”

Our family just returned from a week in Disney (which was a blast, by the way). But we brought our refillable bottles wherever we went. Just threw them in the backpack – and then refilled them at water fountains throughout the parks. Easy, convenient and definitely eco-friendly. So why not? And as a side note, although Disney does not have many recycling bins around the parks, I have it on “insider information” that they DO recycle in their famous “underground” system – which makes me feel better because there is a lot of trash produced at those parks.

A new report by the Environmental Working Group revealed that there is yet another reason to stop buying bottled water. Aside from the pollution/waste issue, it’s now clear that there could be a health issue with bottled water as well. EWG’s study found that there were 38 contaminants found in the 10 major brands of bottled water in their study.

According to the report: “The bottled water industry promotes an image of purity, but comprehensive testing by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed, including toxic byproducts of chlorination in Walmart’s Sam’s Choice and Giant Supermarket’s Acadia brands, at levels no different than routinely found in tap water. Several Sam’s Choice samples purchased in California exceeded legal limits for bottled water contaminants in that state. Cancer-causing contaminants in bottled water purchased in 5 states (North Carolina, California, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland) and the District of Columbia substantially exceeded the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry….”read more

So what should we do? Use reusable #2 plastic or stainless (without BPA plastic liners) water bottles filled with filtered tap water. Easy, cheap and safe.