Essential products, tips, and tricks for making travel less wasteful! Whether you’re traveling to a new city in your state, across the country, or around the world, these products will help you lessen your environmental impact and leave the places you visit as beautiful as you found them!
Let’s face it…travel can be pretty wasteful. While there are some wasteful elements of travel that are inevitable (fuel burned by your airplane/train/car, emergency snacks grabbed on the road, etc) there are a lot of little ways that you can eliminate your environmental impact when not in the comfort of your own home. All It takes it a little planning ahead and you’ll be able to eliminate dozens of cups, straws, and plastic bags from going in the landfills and/or oceans!
Below you’ll find my favorite products, tips, and tricks, for making eco-friendly choices while on the go.
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Bamboo Cutlery
Not only are plastic utensils one of the most common plastic items found in the stomachs of sea turtles and dead marine life, they’re also pretty darn annoying to eat with, since they don’t have the stabbing and scooping power of real cutlery. Thankfully, I discovered bamboo utensils years ago and take them with me everywhere I go (for real: there’s a pack in my car, in my purse, an extra in my backpack, etc), and that includes on vacation! The TSA allows you to bring a single fork, knife, and spoon per person in your carry-on luggage (or more in checked luggage, if needed) and we’ve never had a single issue at security because of our bamboo ones.
A Sturdy Travel Mug
This one is an obvious way to cut down on disposable coffee/tea cups when traveling, but we love having ours in a pinch to use as a water bottle, to keep oatmeal warm or yogurt cold when out and about, etc. Our current favorites are Klean Kanteen and Hydroflask.
Stainless Steel Straw + Cleaner
If you’re an iced coffee lover, this will save you so many straws when traveling! A straw comes with this bamboo cutlery pack, but we also love this 8-pack with different size options.
Stasher Bags
We love these for storing snacks on the road, but they’re particularly useful for make-up, toiletries, and other liquids that need to be in plastic bags when going through airport security. Since they’re much more expensive than disposable plastic bags, we like to challenge ourselves to only fill the medium size bag each with what we need.
Homemade Snacks
Homemade snacks not only taste better (and are usually healthier than convenience store or airport options), they’re a great way to eliminate all those extra wrappers and packaging that comes along with purchasing lots of snacks on the go. Some of our favorite airport/road-trip snacks are:
baby carrots, sliced bell peppers, fresh fruit, etc
Reusable Water Bottles
We like to fill our bottles up at home, drink whatever we can on the way to the airport, then dump the rest at the curb before we walk in. Then, our empty bottles come with us through security and we refill at a water fountain before boarding the plane. That way, while exploring a new city, we always have our own bottles in our bags full of water from our hotel/airbnb and rarely have the need to purchase plastic. Pro Tip: most baristas will fill up your water bottle for you if you ask nicely when ordering a coffee, as will most waiters when they’re making their last round to fill up your water glass before leaving a restaurant.
A Mason Jar
Usually ours starts out the journey full of granola, nuts, etc, but it eventually takes on a second life as an easy drinking cup for water or iced coffe, storage container for restaurant leftovers, or an additional hot coffee mug. It’s also a great place to stick any fragile items for the return trip home- we like to tuck them into a mason jar with a few socks, and everything arrives nice and safe!
Safe travels, friends!
