Quick Green Tip for the Weekend Trip

If you're away for a couple of nights without your usual recycling facilities, here's a small tip that can make a difference.  Something that's easy to do, lightweight and won't make your luggage any bigger:

Take a tupperware pot with you (filled with healthy snacks for your journey down) and bring it back full of compostables and other things that you can't recycle whilst away. 

This is how it worked for me recently:

The hotel we stayed in could recycle bottles, paper and cans and there was a specific bin for these in our room which was great.

There was also a small landfill bin (lined with a plastic bag) that we didn't want to use.

I took a small tupperware pot with me which had fruit and nut snacks for the journey down.  I brought this back containing the following:



  • 3 silver foil takeaway containers
  • 2 plastic straws
  • various teabags, (squeezed out)
  • a cork plus the foil
  • 2 bottle tops
  • olive pips
  • a plastic pot
  • soap
  • plus, 2 plastic forks which were too long for my pot!

Here's what they condensed to:


Over the two nights, we had a takeaway, a couple of beers, some olives and a bottle of wine.

The bottles and teabag paper wrappers were recycled at the hotel.  The containers were rinsed out and left to dry, then scrunched up inside the olive pot.  The rest of the recyclables fitted around this.

The straws came from a drink we had at a restaurant.  We would have asked them not to bring straws if we'd known, but once they arrived, at least we could take them home to recycle them (note to self: future tip - make sure waiters / waitresses know that you don't want straws!)

The forks came with lunch and we kept them for reuse and I brought the soap back as it would have been thrown away - did you know that 70 million bars of soap are wasted every year?  Really good hotels are starting to help with this by recycling soap and sending it to Africa, read further at Clean Conscience.

If the hotel hadn't stated their facility for recycling glass and paper,  I would have been able to bring the paper back in the pot as well and I would have asked the hotel to recycle the bottles or I would have found a recycling point somewhere!

In the scheme of things it may not seem like much, but my green conscience doesn't like me throwing things away anywhere - whether at home or away - This is probably how I earned my title of Queen of Green and if we all did our bit, no matter how small, enormous changes would be made.
  • Every year, 18 million tonnes of waste is sent to a UK landfill site
I went on a landfill site visit and I would highly recommend it to anyone who thinks it's not their problem.  It really makes you stop and realise that we all contribute to these highly toxic, lorry heavy, earth poisoning, sad places and it was also The most disgusting smell imaginable. 

I hope you can see that with barely any time and minimal effort, you could do the same and save on landfill too.

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