As we become aware of better, more sustainable choices, we try to adopt these new ways, and during travel is no exception. We are by no means perfect, but we do believe small incremental changes can make a difference. We wanted to document these to help shine a light that making small changes can happen even when you are doing other things, like traveling around the world for us.

Image of water filter, reusable bag, reusable cup (aka glass jar) & reusable straw

Reusable bags - we had a reusable bag long before they got popular so this practice was not hard to maintain. We try to carry one or both of these bags, or a small backpack, everywhere we go so that we can avoid using plastic or paper bags.
GRAYL Water filter - we added this water filter a little over a year into our RTW, our friends brought it from home with some extra filters. We used it in Nepal (the cities ‘cause the mountains have amazing water) and every place since. Not sure how much of our water bottle consumption we’ve cut, but it feels like a lot. Also, we are sparkling water lovers (we don’t drink sodas) and we have since given up plastic bottle sparkling water and buy glass bottles only, which sadly are getting increasingly hard to find. This doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally buy bottled water, but we’ve drastically reduced our consumption and it hasn’t been as hard as we thought it might be. Not sure if this is the best system for us but we do like it better than buying plastic bottled water.
Drinking cup (formerly a tomato sauce jar) - there are are number of times we go to places that use plastic cups, this is one way to reduce the usage of those cups and also reuse something we already bought. We saw this hack on Instagram and loved the idea so we tried it out. The cup is super easy to clean and it’s small enough to fit in my biggish purse; when I put hot drinks in it I just wrap it with a bandana and use a hair tie to hold it in place so I don’t burn myself. It's so cheap to try out, we’d definitely recommend it! the hardest part is not having the re-usable cup, it’s the habit to bring it and use it, this is a cheap way to train yourself.
Reusable Straw - on our RTW trip we carry around some utensils but we generally leave these in the room, especially the little pairing knife we have. Along with those things we carry a re-usable straw cleaner that, thankfully, is very small. Frankly, we don’t use this much, but it really doesn’t take up much space. The hardest part is not carrying one around, it’s remembering to say ‘no straw please, (or even learning how to say that in another language), once you have that down, you’re good to go.

Toiletries is one of the areas of biggest waste because so much comes packaged in plastic - here’s how we’ve been reducing our bathroom shtuff.

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Shea butter soap bar - never did we think we’d like a soap bar instead of liquid soap, especially when you are traveling; liquid stuff is so much more convenient, or so we thought. This works especially well for us because we always shower at night so the soap bar has enough time to dry before we pack it in the morning. Why do we shower at night? We started this practice when we started traveling to wash off the grime of the day and we’ve kept it since; we sleep better and our soap travels better.

Lava rock scrub - sounds horribly painful but it’s not AND it leaves your skin sooooo incredibly soft; it could also be our soap bar (see below). Here’s how we use it:
- get the whole body wet, including the soap bar
- turn the water off, soap up and scrub without the water running. Why? Not only does this conserve water, but it also doesn’t wash off the soap. The soap softens your skin and allows the rock scrub to run smoothly without hurting.
- rinse off
Sometimes, if the climate is very dry, use a little body oil in the parts that tend to dry, like elbows and knees, but otherwise we can go without lotion. Note that when you rinse off your body will feel like it needs a lotion but once you are dry you won’t feel that your skin is tight.

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Charcoal teeth whitener - we don’t use this very often but we are happy that it seems to be keeping our teeth white, albeit not teeth-whitening-treatment white, and that it’s all natural. We each have one of these tubs and we use the charcoal about twice a month so clearly you can see this could last us a while.

Shampoo bar - our last addition to the mix and we both LOVE it. This bar is from LUSH Co. and it’s for curly hair, even though we both don’t have curly hair, we just have a more dry than oily scalp. Fermin has a tendency to get dry patches on his scalp so he uses this bar and then a vinegar rinse. The vinegar helps balance his pH, which keeps his scalp from getting dry patches. I (Siori) use the same bar and, currently, the last bit of conditioner but as soon as that’s done I’ll switch to Jojoba oil to condition my hair. Because we shower at night, just like with the soap bar, our shampoo bar has plenty of time to dry before travel the next day.

We can still do better but we also believe in not wasting what we do have so until we run out of these things we won’t throw them away. These are the areas we are looking to optimize sustainably going forward:

Toothpaste: we’ve been wanting to try a coconut oil and baking soda homemade toothpaste.
Toothbrush: this’ll be a biggie for us because we love our battery powered toothbrush and we don’t want to replace this brush with some wooden toothbrush that’s shipped from half-way around the world, that doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly. So we need to find some locally produced, eco-friendly, brush.
Sunscreen: we just need to do more research in this area
Deodorant: we are already using a more ‘healthy’ deodorant, but each container is still plastic so we want to make a switch to maybe a homemade one.

We also are looking to offset our carbon footprint from things like air travel, but we need to do our homework first, this is one of those areas where we want to make sure our money is going to the right program.

So, that’s our contribution so far, if you have any other ideas that we can add to our lifestyle or if you want to share your own contributions, please leave them in the comments below.