Why reusing your towel won't save the planet — and what actually might

No single-use plastics. Don't wash your linens. Drink from a reusable water bottle. Turn off the lights when you're not in the room. The air conditioning stops if the sliding doors are open.

These are just some common eco-friendly claims that hotels and other travel companies inundate travelers with.

These actions seem valuable at first glance, given that the tourism industry accounts for approximately 8% of the world's carbon emissions, from transportation to food and energy consumption at hotels and on cruise ships, according to a 2018 study published in the Nature Climate Change journal. That number is only expected to grow.

So, why wouldn’t the travel industry jump on the green bandwagon? According to Booking.com's Sustainable Travel 2024 report, green practices are appealing to 83% of the more than 31,000 survey respondents who said sustainable travel is important to them.

However, not all efforts are equal – or as meaningful.

"It can be confusing because there are a lot of entities trying to tap into the popularity of those buzzwords, and in academia, sustainable development is a broad and vague term that means a lot of different things to different people, so it's very easy to exploit that," said Mike Gunter, a professor of political science department chair at Rollins College who specializes in eco-tourism. "In that case, it's kind of like a marketing ploy, you could say."

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In these ploys, companies deceptively claim to be environmentally friendly without actually making a significant impact. The practice is known as greenwashing. For many travelers, it can be overwhelming to navigate messaging and determine who’s truly following through on their promises.

Here's how to figure out if a travel company is greenwashing or truly sustainable:

Greenwashing versus sustainability

While hanging up your towel so housekeeping doesn't toss it in the wash is "better than nothing," according to Gunter, it's also "not a deep or meaningful in ways true sustainable development would be." This is more of a PR move or a way to reduce a corporation's bottom line.

This is the very scenario that prompted environmentalist Jay Westerveld to first coin the term greenwashing in a 1986 essay following an experience at a hotel in Fiji, according to the National Resources Defense Council. The hotel asked guests to reuse towels to protect the planet, but at the same time, it was clearing out island ecosystems for expansion.

Gunter broke it down into three main concepts that if a company is doing this, it's on the right (and sustainable) path:

◾A light footprint. This begins with how sustainably the hotel operates, such as using renewable energy, conserving water and sourcing food from local farmers and fishermen. It can also expand into a company's role in overtourism, like big cruise ships that can overwhelm port cities and how it supports and interacts with the local community.

◾The money stays locally. On that note, travelers should think about where their money ultimately ends up, like it only the corporation benefits or profits trickle down throughout the community, such as to a local surf guide or ghost tour operator.

◾An educational component. This is about what travelers learn on their trips – wildlife, ocean conservation, or indigenous communities – and how they can bring that new awareness and knowledge when they return home. "We can take these lessons from our travels and apply them back to our homes and communities and, in some cases, lobby for those kinds of changes," Gunter said.

A pioneer in the ecotourism industry who was named as a 2023 Meaningful Business Leader for her work aligning with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Sarah Dusek thinks about sustainability this way: "How does this business become regenerative? How do we put back things that have been lost – not just how do we not take – but how could we use ecotourism to be a regenerative force in the world?"

When Dusek started conceptualizing her newest company, Few & Far, which takes guests on carbon-neutral safaris with local conservation nonprofits, she considered the least impactful ways to not only build her lodge but also how it runs. Instead of importing wood, she's using invasive albizia trees for hardwood, which also removes it from harming the ecosystem while also regenerating the land by regrowing native grasses. The lodge will run on 100% solar energy and food for her trips is sourced within a 50-mile radius from local purveyors. For every traveler, Dusek tracks the carbon emissions of her trips – covered with a carbon offset fee.

How to spot greenwashing

Unfortunately, the travel industry doesn't always make it easy to decipher between greenwashing and a substantial impact. Websites and marketing campaigns like to throw out words like "green" and "eco-friendly," but it's tough to know what's truly being done.

"It's hard to spot, to be able to differentiate greenwashing from really good practices," said Dusek. "I think one of the things for me is looking at how deep the initiatives are."

Here are a few things travelers can look for to determine greenwashing:

◾Find the evidence. There are several third-party accreditations that travelers can rely on, like Fair Life Tourism or B Corporation Certification, that vet and measure a company's impact on the culture, community and environment.

◾Transparency goes a long way. If a travel company is truly making a difference, it will want to make its mission statement, impact numbers and reports easily accessible rather than only vague claims. "The biggest red flag for me is either no communication about any of these things or very surface-level communication," Dusek said.

◾Check the community partners. One way to see if a company is invested in the community is to check if it partners with local nonprofits, like the Malama Hawaii Program, in which hotels encourage visitors to pay it forward by teaming up with an organization for volunteer work in exchange for a free night or other perks.

◾Ask an employee. If you call up the hotel or ask the front desk about its eco-initiatives, pay attention to how detailed their response is. "If it really is an embedded philosophy in the company, everybody will know what they do," Dusek said.

While there is an onus on the travel industry to shrink its footprint, tackling a crisis as vast as climate change demands collective action from all industries.

"Ecotourism is not a silver bullet to address sustainable development, climate change, or any of our overarching societal problems," Gunter said. "But it has remarkable potential to expand consciousness on the problem and tap into some of the ideological divides that we have in the U.S."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is greenwashing? How to know if your hotel is truly sustainable.