Responsible Tourism News South Africa

TTC's TreadRight Foundation, brands amplify plastic free initiatives for Earth Month

To highlight its respect and recognition for Earth Month, The Travel Corporation recently announced that, from the beginning of its 2019 operating season, its brands: Trafalgar, Insight Vacations, Luxury Gold, CostSaver, Brendan Vacations, Contiki, AAT Kings and Inspiring Journeys will no longer make available single-use plastic bottles on its coaches.
TTC's TreadRight Foundation, brands amplify plastic free initiatives for Earth Month
©Kichigin Aleksandr via 123RF

These brands join sister companies Uniworld, Red Carnation Hotels and U River Cruises, which have already removed plastic water bottles from their operations previously.

Furthermore, these brands are also replacing single-use plastic luggage tags with reusable, durable luggage tags.

With single-use plastic water bottles no longer being made available on its coaches, TTC and its non-profit TreadRight Foundation maintain their combined momentum on its unnecessary single-use plastics elimination initiative, announced in June last year – TTC committed publically to eliminating all non-essential single-use plastics across all operations by 2022, across all of its brands.

This latest initiative is expected to reduce plastic waste by several hundred thousand plastic bottles per year.

"Our passionate, caring global team is unified in its total commitment to our mission to make travel matter. This means changing a number of ways we’ve operated in the past. This announcement marks an important next step in fulfilling our pledge to eliminate all non-essential single-use plastics across our all our operations by 2022," says Brett Tollman, chief executive, TTC and founder of The TreadRight Foundation.

"We are working with our partners on the ground to make sure guests still have access to clean drinking water and will be identifying convenient points along the way they can safely and responsibly source drinking water. We will also be continuing our active efforts to find innovative ways to remove the few remaining single-use plastics throughout our organisation’s hotel properties, such as shampoo and body lotion plastic bottles."

Building a sustainable travel industry

Further underscoring the importance of the need to eliminate single-use plastics from their daily lives and create a more sustainable travel industry, TTC teams around the world will be mobilising all Earth Month long for community clean-ups, sustainability education seminars, and volunteer projects.

The TreadRight Foundation will also be helping travellers explore more sustainably and make their travel matter with a series of videos providing tips on eliminating plastics and conserving water when travelling, as well as the do’s and don’ts for travellers interacting with animals.

Let's do Biz