Green Living
music11
member
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
green(er) travel
in Green Living
Does anyone have any tips for being more eco-conscious while traveling? H and I will be taking our honeymoon abroad, and are trying to look for ways to minimize our travel-related waste.
Thanks 
:)
Re: green(er) travel
The main environmental impacts of travel are more hidden than wrappers and plastic water bottles, not that the previous posters suggestions are bad, but they don't really scratch the surface. The greenhouse gases produced by the jet fuel used to take you overseas are huge (even when divided by all the passengers on the airplane). There is a lot of hidden waste involved in just about any meal eaten at a restaurant, even if you eat all the food that was brought out on your plate. At most hotels, all towels and sheets are washed daily, which uses a tremendous amount of water and energy. Many places suffer from environmental degradation of simply having more human activity in an area than that place can support.
The sad truth is that there is no such thing as green travel. Which is unfortunate because I love to travel and I think there are also many benefits to people seeing other parts of the world. We try to use public transit while we are abroad, eat some of our meals from the grocery store or markets, stay at hotels where we have the option to decline services like excessive cleaning (and decline them--most budget places have gotten with the program on this or never offered those services in the first place), and we try to take fewer longer trips instead of more shorter ones. But I'd be kidding myself if I said I thought it was green... like, at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the environmental impact of our 2-week trip to Peru this year was bigger than our entire impact at home (though I think we do a very good job of being green at home). The green way to travel is to stay home and watch Planet Earth. :-(
Oh, and all this is discounting the environmental impact of the companies I own shares of in my 401(k), which is probably greater than the impact of my own personal life and travels. Boy, I've gotten really cynical haven't I?
While it's basically impossible to avoid the whole jet fuel thing, you can buy carbon offsets to assuage your guilt and help the planet. It's not as good as not burning the fuel in the first place, but I'm sure it does make a difference.
I completely agree with all of this, but figured flights, hotels, and restaurants are pretty unavoidable when traveling, so I didn't bother to mention them.