Traveling can be incredibly stressful. If you're flying somewhere, you have to think about hauling luggage, getting through security, finding your gate, and managing your carry-on's. You worry about when to get to the airport and you have to check that your flight is on time. The whole process is so overwhelming that there's little room to think of anything else.

Especially zero-waste practices.

So, why is it that airports and airplanes make it so difficult to buy anything but plastic-wrapped snacks and only place garbage cans in front of us?

This year for spring break, I was fortunate enough to go to Florida for a family vacation. To prepare for the plane ride, I packed my set of bamboo utensils, my reusable water bottle, a reusable coffee mug, and a few snacks from the bulk section in my own containers. Of course, this made for a bulky carry-on, but it allowed me to refill my water bottle in the airport and buy coffee without just pitching the mug after drinking it.

As I live on the West Coast, I was lucky that the airport I flew out from provided recycling bins and water bottle fillers. I certainly believe that more options could be available for more sustainable travel, but at least it was something! However, most of the rest of the country was a different story. On the way to Florida, we had a layover in Chicago, whose airport reflects little thought about environmental practices. There are water fountains few and far between, but they make it hard to fill up water bottles, which I'm sure leads a majority of travelers to simply buy a plastic water bottle, which will no doubt be thrown into the garbage, as I did not see a single recycling bin in the airport during my time there.

The planes themselves are no better. Our first flight was a red-eye, so blankets wrapped in a plastic film sat on our seats as we boarded. I noticed a majority of the people around me opening these blankets and throwing the wrapper into the first trash bag that the flight attendants brought around. What's more, is nearly everyone around me who ordered sodas asked for the can along with a plastic cup to pour it in. Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the airline provided an option to recycle, which did at least give a place for cans and those plastic cups to end up beside in the trash.

When we arrived in Florida, I had low expectations for the state of their environmental practices, which were hardly ever met. We stayed at a lovely family resort on the Gulf Coast. As is the case with many locations that serve mass amounts of people in busy times such as spring break, the resort clearly made decisions based on ease instead of sustainability. The bars served drinks in plastic cups and the restaurants sold things wrapped in plastic to be eaten using plastic silverware.

Still, I was very pleased to see that the entire resort had begun to use paper instead of plastic straws and that they sold reusable cups that they refilled for a discount. This was a good sign!

But yet again, the trip back was less than satisfactory for my environmental expectations. We had a layover in Denver, which has very few options for recycling. However, to my surprise, they advertised a composting system for paper towels! The plane ride was even worse than the first though, in that they did not offer to recycle at all.

Overall, in my assessment of the travel experience, I was disappointed to see that there were not more options or systems in place to transition airports and busy resorts to sustainable businesses. The trip really made me think about the extra measures one must take to practice environmental behaviors during travel (such as stuffing suitcases full of plastics we could recycle at home).

One rarely thinks of the massive carbon emissions resulting from air travel, but it isn't the only aspect of traveling that brings about a negative impact on the environment. I believe that it should become systematically normal to see sustainable options offered on a wider scale throughout America. How can we expect mass amounts of people to think sustainably when they don't have the physical option to compost or even recycle?