Despite all the talk of alternatives to business travel, sometimes you just have to fly. Take Olympic athletes, for example: You can't Skype yourself across a finish line. They travel all the time, from training to World Cup events to the Olympics and back– and it turns out many of them are going green while going for gold.
Many of these athletes set an eco-example for those of us in sales, consulting and other gigs that make air travel necessary.
Although the eco-sector can appear unsympathetic tothe average business traveller, green groups have put some effort into working with elite athletes. Especially successful is Play It Cool, a joint effort between the David Suzuki Foundation and Climate Project Canada.
“These athletes have to travel,” spokeswoman Andrea Foster says from Vancouver, where she's accompanying Olympians who are part of her program. For them, she says, “it's about compromise.”
Olympians, including cross-country skier Sara Renner and snowboarder Justin Lamoureux, both Play It Cool members, have committed to changing the way they do other things in the knowledge they have to fly.
Is it possible to take a page from their playbook? Yes, if you're willing to change a few key habits.
Foster has programs for her team's specific needs – how they get to and from the rinks and hills, for instance – but for the most part, Play It Cool's approach fits the average corporate traveller's needs.
Here’s a checklist, adapted and extended, from the program’s rulebook:
- Eat locally. Flying that February orange in from wherever it grew is a huge carbon dump.
- Eat less meat. According to the World Wildlife Federation, raising animals for food creates more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars and trucks in the world combined.
- Pack a mug. Or a reusable water bottle, or a flask, depending on your drinking habits. You’re going to be drinking a lot on your trip, no matter what line of work you’re in, so come prepared.
- Stay at a green hotel. With loyalty programs worked into most managed travellers’ contracts, this isn’t always possible, but most chains have multiple brands, and some brands are greener than others. Check out Green Key, a hotel rating system pioneered a decade ago by the Hotel Association of Canada and just recently adopted in the U.S. For the record, Fairmont is the preferred chain of both Play It Cool and the WWF.
- Take transit or shared shuttles to and from the airport. In most cities, it’s almost as fast as a cab, and it’s always cheaper.
- Fly during the day. Contrails – those exhaust streams you see rolling out behind jets – act as heat traps that are more damaging at night, since during the day they also reflect sunlight upward, creating a mitigating effect.
- Join a car-share program. Outfits such as Zipcar have vehicles distributed in cities across the continent. Their hourly (rather than daily) rates encourage short-term use, and being a member may also encourage you to use them at home, possibly lessening your dependence on your own car.
- Don’t use the soap – or any of the other toiletries. Bring your own, in small refillable containers (perhaps harvested from an earlier hotel stay). You’ll save the waste and packaging on every item you find in your hotel bathroom. As gogreentravelgreen.com has pointed out, some hotel vanity sets, with their individually wrapped cotton swabs, have more packages than items.
There’s a lot you can do, but Gord Perks, a former activist with Greenpeace and Pollution Probe and current Toronto city councillor, says the bottom line is clear: “A flight is equivalent to everything else I do in a year.”
That means that ultimately, if you want to reduce your footprint, you’ll want to talk to your travel managers about what else your company can do. Trains in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor are often a possibility, as is an investment in new life-size screens for videoconferencing.
The easiest way to go, though, is carbon offsets. Though some offset companies are criticized as ineffectual, David Suzuki recommends carbon offsetters that follow the Gold Standard program, doing work his foundation and other non-governmental organizations (including WWF International and Greenpeace International) consider the most helpful. The basic principle is sound: Spend a very small amount of money investing in a project that cleans up or reduces as much carbon as you’re producing. This year, the Vancouver company Offsetters (which does not follow Gold Standard) has become the first-ever official supplier of offsets to an Olympic Games.
But, as a business traveller, there’s only so much you can do to change your organization’s policies. Happily, you might be surprised at how willing travel managers and colleagues are to jump on the green bandwagon. A couple of years ago, Andrew Ference, a Boston Bruins defenceman from Alberta, famously persuaded 500 fellow National Hockey League players to buy carbon offsets for their average 10 tonnes of annual travel carbon.
If they know that NHL players and Olympians are doing it, travel managers and chief operating officers may get in the game too.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Do you have feedback or business travel questions? E-mail roadwork@globeandmail.com.
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