Sustainable? No thanks

Airport urinals offend me. When I walk out of the bathroom, and every one of them is flushing in concert — not just the one I’m using — I think about all the wasted water. And I wonder how much the airport could save by adjusting the sensors. How much more could be saved if they switched to waterless urinals?

There’s a lot of talk about the importance of sustainable tourism, which is the idea that you’re diminishing your impact on the environment while giving back to the community. As a director of an eco-tourism hotel, Turtle Island in Fiji, it’s something I live by.

But when I’m on the road, I’ve noticed that talk is cheap.

For example, I ordered a coffee at the Washington airport recently, and an attendant handed me a handful of napkins, as though I were going to spill half of my latte. When I returned them, she looked at me as if I came from another planet. I spared her a lecture on resource management.

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned glass? When I stay at some hotels, the only available cups are made of plastic and they are hermetically sealed in — plastic. So you have two plastic items that will hopefully be recycled, but probably won’t be. It must be too inconvenient for a hotel to provide a glass that can be washed. It would, however, be far better for the environment.

Ditto for those little bottles of shampoo and lotion. These landfill-clogging vials should be replaced by wall-mounted dispensers that can be refilled. When I see the collection of bottles in my hotel bathroom, I leave them be. I travel with my own shampoo.

On a recent transcontinental flight, an attendant offered me a meal and snack on several occasions. I turned them all down.

“Not hungry?” she asked.

I was. But I couldn’t stomach the thought of the aluminum cans and plastic wrappers that would almost certainly end up in a large plastic trash bag, and then in a landfill, where it would take decades to break down.

It isn’t just the travel industry that’s guilty of this type of doublespeak. I’m always reading polls in which an overwhelming number of travelers insist that the environment is important to them in their travel decisions.

Take something as seemingly small as a hotel shower head. If you switched from one of those “blow you through the wall” showers to a tamer, low-flow model, you’d cut back on water consumption by more than 50 percent.

But when I visited an upscale London hotel recently, which billed itself as “concerned” about the environment — at least when it comes to its towel policy — I asked the general manager if he’d ever considered installing low-flow showers.

“You’re kidding, right?” he laughed. “Where’s the luxury in that? Our customers would never go for it.”

Andrew Fairley is a director of the International Ecotourism Society.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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