Vacations Blog

At home we take for granted recycling programs. It has become easy, part of our daily routine. And when we can’t do it on vacation, it almost makes us feel dirty and out-of-sorts. Its like when you live in a city (or state) that has banned indoor smoking and then travel to state that doesn’t ban indoor smoking. At least with smoking you don’t have to contribute to that gross smell and feeling. When your travel destination doesn’t recycle, it’s hard to avoid making garbage.

The sheer enormity of the problem is mind boggling. I visited my time share in Cabo San Lucas last year. Fortunately it has its own desalinization plant, so I wasn’t using up lots of bottled water. But I was using tons of glass bottles and aluminum cans for juice, a lots of paper in the form cardboard cereal boxes, local newspapers, flyers, advertisements, promotional brochures, etc.

Every time I threw something out (or pretended I wasn’t really throwing it out by leaving the item next to the trash can in the hopes that the recycle fairies would rescue it) I’d get that dirty feeling. I would mentally calculate the number of articles I threw out that day that I would have normally recycled, times the number of rooms at this large time share, times the number of days in the year, times the number of similar large hotels/time-shares in Cabo San Lucas (pictured). It was staggering.

From our experience in the US, we know it is tough to institute recycling programs. Tough but doable. It takes commitment and it takes a few large groups that are committed to providing enough volume of recyclable materials to make it worthwhile. In large resort towns, this means if the large resorts don’t recycle, then no one in the town or the whole area will recycle. But it also means that once a critical mass of resorts starts, it can and will spread. A local market for the recycling inputs, outputs and services can be formed and sustained. It means more local jobs. And it sends the message that those visiting tourists do care about the local environment.

So herewith is a suggestion. If you’d like your timeshare to institute a recycling program, let them know. If your timeshare has a recycling program, leave a comment here and share with others readers. Let’s work together and encourage recycling programs to protect the environment in those very places whose environments are so beautiful we want to visit them. And for more discussions on eco-friendly travel, visit Simple Green Choices.