By Mary & Martin, Birland Cottage
This is a simple Two Point Plan for sustainable purchasing we’ve prompted ourselves to draw up as a Green Ambassador for the Visit Tamar Valley Green Tourism Programme. It focuses on purchasing outside of the significant decisions to be made about green energy, travel and construction.
Our starting points for purchasing have been to:
• Avoid buying more new ‘stuff’ unnecessarily
• Seek out what is produced or provided sustainably
• Ensure a quality visitor experience, enhanced by informed awareness of sustainability.
Think green before you buy
Trying to ‘think green’ made us slow down and ask ourselves questions, rather than plunge straight into buying things.
We share those questions as Point one: Think green before you buy… And as part of our sustainability learning, we’ve come across certification symbols and acronyms that were new to us. Spending time looking online, we found the Ecolabel Index.
As the largest global directory of its kind, its currently tracking 456 ecolabels in 199 countries and 25 industry sectors, so that’s a pretty comprehensive resource! The Index for the UK includes just under 90 ecolabels and like the global directory, covers many different sectors. In focusing on what might be particularly relevant to sustainable tourism, we found The Sustainability Agency website very useful. There’s a great Blog on their site which includes a periodic table of sustainability certifications, explains what the labels mean and acknowledges the issue of greenwashing. We ‘got’ what ‘GOTS’ means and realised there was an ASC as well as a MSC from reading this and, not wanting to reinvent the wheel, share this resource as Point two: Labels to look out for…
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