Traveling for business offers excellent opportunities to meet new clients, network, and expand your company. However, it can be challenging, especially if traveling for the first time.
When business travel heavily impacts the environment, it’s crucial to find ways to reduce this effect. While video conferences and digital communication are great alternatives to traveling, they aren’t always practical. Therefore, it’s important to adopt eco-friendly practices when travel is unavoidable.
These practices will ensure that your business trip has the least impact possible. They touch on various parts of your trip, from your destination choice to the meals you’ll eat.
This blog will explore the practices Serviced Apartments London proposes you use to help your business trip stay eco-friendly.
Best Eco-Friendly Practices for Business Travel from London’s Serviced Apartments
By incorporating eco-friendly practices into your trip plans, you can make a positive impact.
For your next business trip, consider these practices:
- Opt for Public Transport
The first eco-friendly habit you should maintain while traveling for business is using public transport. You should select this option to reach your destination or travel within the city once you’ve arrived. In turn, you should select accommodations that are near public transport.
In particular, you should prioritize travel by train as it’s one of the most sustainable options. Additionally, you should avoid air travel. According to reports, though air travel is technically a public transport, it’s the source of 90% of business travel emissions.
- Eat and Cook Local
Another way to reduce your carbon footprint is to eat meals made with locally sourced produce and cook them yourself. Since local ingredients come from nearby, they have less environmental impact than foodstuff shopping markets import.
Meanwhile, cooking in your accommodation can cause less environmental impact if you do it sustainably. More specifically, you should shop for local ingredients, only cook what you eat, reduce packaging waste by turning down plastic packaging, etc. Plus, this practice allows you to cook based on your dietary restrictions, cut dinner costs, eat at your schedule, and eat healthier. Therefore, you should select an accommodation with a kitchen where you can cook these meals.
- Travel with Reusable Items
A practice that goes hand-in-hand with sustainable eating while you’re away on business is traveling with reusable items. Traveling with reusable bags allows you to shop without producing packing waste. Similarly, you can reduce your waste by bringing reusable utensils, straws, water bottles, thermos, etc.
Moreover, the items you bring should be made of sustainable materials. For instance, you could use a hemp bag instead of a plastic one. They should also be durable so you can keep using them during future business trips.
- Turn down Service
You can help the environment by turning down hotel service. Often, these services include daily cleaning and laundry, which aren’t necessary on a daily basis. You can even increase the period between cleanings by being responsible with your space and minimizing messes.
When you know your room doesn’t need cleaning, you can leave a ‘do not disturb’ sign instead. Then, cleaning services will skip your room.
Additionally, some hotels have a policy about how to signal that you desire them to replace your towels. According to studies, hotels use 16% of their water for laundry. Therefore, you can reduce this number by opting only to signal that you desire new towels when you absolutely need them.
- Hire Electric Transport
Using electric transport is another good eco-friendly practice for business trips. When you use this type of transport, you reduce the CO2 emissions and carcinogens you release into the air through your travel.
However, electric vehicles are only as eco-friendly as the source of this energy. Moreover, the batteries used to make electric cars require minerals whose sourcing negatively impacts the land, waterways, wildlife, and local communities. The disposal of these batteries also raises an issue since they can be dangerous to the environment.
At the moment, what you can do before you choose an electric vehicle to transport you to your business meetings is to verify the local power grid. If your destination’s power grid uses renewable energy sources, it will release fewer emissions than a traditional car.
- Choose Sustainable Destinations
While the nature of your business travel may dictate the destination, you should opt for a more sustainable location whenever possible. This could mean choosing an accommodation that boasts of its eco-friendly facilities.
If you have the option to choose the destination, such as for a team-building trip, you should opt for a sustainable town or city. It should be carbon-neutral, offer convenient public transport, have efficient recycling programs, and facilitate buying locally.
- Turn Off Appliances
Lastly, you should consider turning off appliances and devices in your accommodation. In particular, you should turn off your conditioner while you’re away during meetings. In addition, you could also turn off other devices such as the television and your computer when you’re not using them.
Similarly, you should minimize charging your devices. Once they’re fully charged, you should unplug them. If you’re going to sleep, refrain from charging devices since they’ll likely fill up before you wake up, wasting electricity and ruining your batteries.
Conclusion
Now you know that the best practices to ensure your business trip is eco-friendly all require you to choose sustainability consciously. From the destination of your trip to the transport you use to arrive there, you should make each decision based on how you can cut down on carbon emissions, reduce waste, and reuse items.
Furthermore, you should research your destination, accommodation, and transportation to ensure you make the right decision. Then, you’ll need to plan to ensure that the eco-friendly practices are a convenient option for you.
Now that you have all the information you need to go on an eco-friendly work trip, remember to use these practices consistently.
