Club Med Insider

Plan Green Before You Leave

Before heading down to Club Med, you can plan to travel more sustainably. In today’s tough economy, things that qualify as “Green” travel could also be considered “Smart” travel. For instance — pack light. Packing light reduces total weight carried on the plane and saves fuel. It also saves you from paying those pesky airline surcharges and will lighten the luggage lugging.

What’s that on your face? Choose a sunblock like Caribbean Solutions and a non-petroleum based lip balm. Bodies and lips don’t need petroleum and neither do the oceans and coral reefs. The vast majority of mass-market cosmetics manufacturers use petroleum and mineral oil in their moisturizers, because they are much cheaper than top- quality alternatives like beeswax, sweet almond oil, hyaluronic acid, collagen, vegetable squalene, or shea butter. Ingredients that are 100 percent derived from petroleum are mineral oil, carbomers, paraffin, microcrystalline wax, and petrolatum. You can recognize petroleum-based ingredients on a label when you see the words “ethyl,” “butyl,” “methyl,” octyl,” “propyl,” “ene,” “eth,” and PVP. The petro-chemical contents found in most commercial sunblocks kill coral. Our reefs continue to disappear at an alarming rate and most underwater enthusiasts don’t realize that their sunscreen is contributing to the damage.

Anyone remember Spike Lee’s character Mars Blackman who used to say, “It’s all about the shoes”? Most shoes and flip-flops (especially the soles) contain harmful chemicals that leach into the soil and water, so I packed a pair of Autonomie Project shoes which they construct using sustainably grown rubber (no harmful chemicals) and they also use fair trade practices for the workers. A win-win with real rubber soles that last much longer and contain no toxins.

Club Med Ixtapa Pacific and the nearby areas offer glorious photo ops, especially at sunset. But, before you cave to temptation and purchase those cheap disposable cameras at your local drugstore, think about the large amount of energy required to produce them. Disposable cameras only get used once, then wind-up in a landfill— so better invest in a digital camera for the long haul.

And if you haven’t gotten on the e-ticket bandwagon already, jump on, there’s plenty of room! Using e-tickets saves time when checking in for a flight and eliminates the waste of paper airline tickets.