There is something paradoxical about a travel company that calls itself environmentally friendly. Ethical, perhaps - that one we can stand behind, because operating ethically is something we work at every day. But environmentally friendly, when the job involves putting groups of students on planes? That deserves an honest answer rather than a glossy one.
Here is the honest version. Flying has a footprint, and no amount of good intention changes that. What we can do is make deliberate choices at every other point, so that the way we travel is as responsible as we can make it. Supporting Trees for Life is one of those choices.
Trees for Life is a Scottish charity working to rewild the Highlands, and in particular to bring back the Caledonian Forest - native woodland that has been all but lost, restored patch by patch as habitat for rare wildlife. Our own part is simple. For every person we send on expedition, we pay for a tree to be planted in the Highlands when they get home. Send thirteen students and three teachers to Borneo, and sixteen trees go into the ground on their return.
Trees are the most visible part of it, but not the whole. Our office sits in Exeter, a Fairtrade City, and we make Fairtrade purchasing choices to match. It shapes the trips too: our Fairtrade School Trips take students to see plantations first-hand in Ghana, India and Peru, where a lesson about global trade stops being something in a textbook.
On a number of itineraries - Costa Rica, Borneo, Vietnam, Kenya, Morocco and Thailand - we build in an environment clean-up, where the team spends time clearing waste from a stretch of coast or countryside and disposing of it properly. We ask participants to travel with reusable and biodegradable kit where they can, and we recycle what we're able to, though we're honest that in some of the places we visit that is harder than it sounds.
Closer to home the day-to-day is less glamorous, but it counts: an extra jumper before the heating goes on, trains to client meetings rather than cars, brochures printed on recycled paper, and the lights and computers off before the last person leaves. Our electricity comes entirely from renewable sources through Octopus Energy.
The choices get harder where animals are involved, and we would rather show our working than gloss over it. On our Kenya itineraries the trek through the Loita Hills uses donkey porters. The cynical reader will ask how we can be sure those animals are well treated, and it is a fair question. The answer is that we won't work anywhere we believe an animal's welfare isn't genuinely looked after, and we hold to that even when it costs us an itinerary. The clearest example is the elephant ride, still on the bucket list of many a South-East Asian gap year. You won't find one on any STC trip, and you never will. It cannot be squared with our animal welfare policy, so instead we look for ways for students to see wildlife behaving as wildlife should.
So, how is a travel company environmentally friendly? Not perfectly, and we won't pretend otherwise. One tree, or one clean-up, won't fix anything on its own. But the choices a company makes when nobody is forcing its hand are what tell you what it actually values.
For more information about our charity work, follow this link to the Responsible Travel page of our website: STC Expeditions | What Do We Do?