SustainableCommunity
Rent a Local Friend for Summer
Jul 30th, 2010
Posts Tagged ‘travel’
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Summer is well upon us, and as the shinkansen tracks start bending in the heat, some of us are planning our escape overseas.
But traveling in itself can be hard and there is only so much you can do with just a guide book for company.
Having a friend to visit always makes traveling so much more fun and rewarding. Then wouldn’t it be great to have someone waiting for you wherever you wanted to go?
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The famous English double-decker bus is not changing colour, it is just becoming a bit nicer to the environment. Using the latest hybrid technology means that it will be 15% more fuel efficient than existing hybrid buses and use 40% less fuel than conventional diesel driven double-decker buses.
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In the light of the current volcanic travel disruptions, we thought highlighting this article on traveling without flying would be a good idea. The website called The Man in Seat 61 is arguably THE BEST train travel resource in the world. It will tell you how to get from A-B without getting on a plane, anywhere!
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Recently greenz.jp has been attracting a lot of attention from international sources. Two of our most recent listings were in i-genius, a world community of social entrepreneurs that seeks to inspire a new generation of social innovators, social business and social enterprise, and Wend Magazine, a forum for real people, writing real stories about real adventures and real environmental issues. (more…)
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In preparation for the 1300 anniversary of the relocation of the ancient capital next year, all of Nara prefecture is excited, and to add to their excitement is a new green hotel right in the middle of downtown. Let’s take a look at this green hotel, that really lives up to its namesake, before it opens to everyone else.
The hotel will be born as Super Hotel LOHAS JR Nara Station in the enviable place of 10 minutes from the station’s main gate on March 13th. Super Hotel is a giant chain of business hotels which has over 87 locations throughout Japan. And now, with their new “LOHAS” brand they have set out strong with a new environmental effort.
An artist’s rendering of the Super Hotel LOHAS at JR Nara station
The most distinguished feature of this hotel is its “Eco Stay.” By signing up for the Eco Stay via their website you can offset the CO2 created by your stay at the hotel.
An advertisement for the Eco StayAccording to the carbon offset provider gConscious, the plan was envisioned to be used for green energy enterprises of advanced nations. The hotel, as well as having carbon offsets, uses natural raw materials like 100% diatoms, a type of algae in its interior design and offers natural, additive-free bread and local vegetables for breakfast. There are so many things here to appeal to the LOHAS conscious inclined.
Actually, this is not the first time Super Hotel has undertaken an environmental effort for their hotels. Not only did Super Hotels announce they would curb the 6.82 kg of co2 that is created from a night’s stay, and implement an energy and water conservation based low energy plan, they also began trash reduction and recycling plans over ten years ago. The results of these efforts are that over half of Super Hotel’s offices and hotels have received the international standard for environmental systems management, ISO 14001.
The first step of their environmental plans was doing away with the disposable razors and combs. Then they closed the hotel restaurants, replaced the toilet paper with recycled toilet paper, replaced the tea bags with powdered tea, replaced the light bulbs with inverter bulbs, and after all that they did away with hotel-wide, central air conditioning for single room air conditioners. For a hotel, this is probably about the limit they can do . This might be just about everything you could do to make a hotel more environmentally friendly, I think. You can really see the pay off of their unrelenting efforts. All this in total is what Super Hotel calls “Super Eco.” Check it out in detail here.
The opening of the new Super Hotel LOHAS JR Nara Station establishes it as the new ultimate institution amongst all eco conscious hotels of the Super Hotel fleet. I think we can say, this is truly a grand compilation of all the eco efforts that are out there for environmentally friendly hotels.
When we choose a hotel, the location and cost are most likely the things we look for, but from now on let’s include one more thing in our search; an eco standard. I think we would have a good stay and a new, different kind of enjoyment on our holidays if we spend some time in a place like this.
This article has been translated from the original Japanese post
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