The environmental protesters who camped out near London’s Heathrow Airport last week and demonstrated noisily over the weekend had what most business travelers consider a radical agenda: A long-term reduction in flights to offset the carbon footprint of the world’s airlines.
I think my green credentials are pretty good; the perennially threatened Hudson River is literally at the edge of my backyard, so I have an up close and personal view of how humans mistreat nature. But I’ve never thought much about frequent travel and the environment. As much as I condemn their business practices and financial models, I’ve never thought of airlines as big, bad polluters. Nor have I paid much attention to my own actions on the road and how they might affect the environment.
But I think I get it now. We might want to continue to fly globally, but there’s no reason not to act locally to reduce business travel’s impact on the planet.
I’m going to leave the metaphoric elephant in the room—airlines’ carbon emissions—to the experts for now. But here are some small steps we can all take to become greener business travelers.
Soft Goods, Hard Impact
Partially for environmental reasons and partially because it reduces their overhead costs, hotels around the world have instituted in-room conservation efforts. They want you to use your bathroom towels more than once, and they would be thrilled if you took a pass on the daily change of bed linens.
“In the 30,000 hotels in the United States, there are more than 2 billion sheets washed every year and almost the same number of towels,” says luxury-hotel consultant Michael Matthews. “And 99 percent of the water used to do all that washing doesn’t get recycled.”