As the summer holidays come to an end, I will address the elephant in the room. ‘Flying away on holiday’. This is going to be my biggest flaw, I cannot (currently) imagine giving up flying as I love travelling and experiencing our wonderful planet too much.
The aviation industry currently accounts for 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions and is one of the fastest growing polluters. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you put it into the context of your personal carbon footprint, 2 short haul and 1 long haul flights a year could pretty much outweigh any sustainable behaviour that you have undertaken for the rest of the year! So as much as I can’t give up flying I am going to have to try to ration myself from now on.
As another option I had been researching the numerous carbon offsetting schemes available but have yet to find a scheme that I fully believe in and more importantly I don’t believe this is a problem that we should feel we can buy ourselves out of. Yes, I believe that investing in carbon off-setting projects is a great idea but not as a means to ease my conscious to fly away on holiday.
This summer we therefore decided to travel short haul for our family holiday (as we had already flown long haul in February). I initially planned to take it a step further and take the train to Sweden and Denmark, however it would have meant that we spent more than half of our holiday on a train so my husband (understandably) flatly refused that option! As a compromise I therefore came up with a plan to include both flying and rail. So we flew to Stockholm for a few days, then took a train to Copenhagen and then another train and bus to Billund (Legoland of course) before flying home. So unfortunately we still had two flights but at least we avoided the middle one. I have to say that the trains were great! They were easy to book, affordable, convenient and comfortable. In Sweden the trains are even powered by renewable electricity so it was definitely a greener option. I will definitely be looking into more rail holidays in the future, though I may have to learn to pack more minimalist!!!!
As a side note, in terms of our accommodation we stayed in a Scandic Hotel both in Stockholm and Copenhagen and I was delighted to see that they were serious about sustainability too. To mention just a few of their initiatives, we had recycling bins in our hotel room, refillable bottles of toiletries in the bathrooms, the ‘hang up your towel if you want to reuse it’ scheme, local and organic restaurant menus, a food waste management programme, plus they have now taken it a step further to say they will only clean your room if you ask them to, which will apparently save up to 10 million litres of water per year!
Checking the green credentials of my accommodation is not something that I had previously considered but it will definitely be something that I take into account when choosing future holidays as I now see that there are places out there that are taking it seriously. I am not sure how easy it will be to search for green hotels but the LEED certification and EU Ecolabel are some accreditations that I have found so far.
The way I am currently looking at it is, not only am I going to have to ration my flying but I am also going to have to increase my sustainability efforts in other areas of my life to try to offset my flying emissions. (My own personal carbon offsetting scheme). So the vegetarian diet may have to be accelerated!
