When so many people around the world participate in oceanfront or coastal activities as a part of their vacation or every day lifestyle, the morality of understanding how it impacts our ecosystems should be at the forefront of our minds. The first question we should ask ourselves is this: what are the benefits of coastal tourism? And what can we do to ensure that there are more pros than cons?

This week, we’re excited to announce Sea Going Green’s partnership with Aquablu, an innovative water filtration system looking to change the way that we access clean drinking water, leaving bottled water behind in the dust.

Aquablu allows for customers to tap into polluted or otherwise non-drinkable water and filter out micro-plastics, chemicals, antibiotics, heavy metals and more. This technology can even be used on board marine vessels such as cruise ships and luxury boats, which by using this product helps lower their CO2 footprint and mitigates the risk of plastic bottles (and caps) ending up overboard!

Read more about Aquablu in our interview with the founder, Marnix, and see for yourself how this could be a great addition to your home, office or boat!

Can a hotel be luxurious and sustainable at the same time? Is it possible that a hotel with as many as 200 rooms can generate its own electricity? Could a hotel serve as a social hotspot for locals? These are the questions I asked myself before writing this article. 

In this blog, I will highlight the newly constructed Hotel Jakarta Amsterdam in The Netherlands to showcase the forward thinking concepts that they have integrated into their hotel operations including electricity consumption, waste production and other innovative practices that incorporate sustainability.

Read on to see how this hotel embodies the “green future” and provides a quick city-escape without even having to take a plane.

In my last blog “Transitioning from a Tourism-Dependent Region to a Sustainable Paradise: The Caribbean Case Study pt. I” I talked about human pressures on the natural environment in the Caribbean. Even though these pressures are substantial, I think there is a way to turn the most unsustainable tourism-dependent region in the world into a sustainable tourism paradise. In this blog i’ll explain how this can come to be by using the example of Baja, Mexico. 

Did you know that the Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region on earth? Out of the top 25 countries that have more than 25% tourism contribution to GDP, 15 are located in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Sea is home to around ten percent of the world’s coral reefs, including the largest coral system in the Northern Hemisphere and the highest concentration of marine species in the Atlantic Ocean. With these factors taken into consideration, you can understand why the environment is so important for a thriving tourism sector.

After spending the last two years traveling, working and volunteering in various parts of Southeast Asia, Caitlin found herself fascinated by the explosion in tourism, the spread of Western influence and the impact tourism is having on the local community.

In part II of this blog piece, she will discuss her observations while carrying out fieldwork in Lombok to provide insights on the management and implementation of the Mandalika Project.

Read on to see how local communities are being affected and what prospects lie ahead for the island as it faces rapid development.

Look out Bali, Lombok, the popular tourist destination’s neighboring island, is slated to become Asia’s new tourism hotspot. The new Indonesian-Government mandated “Mandalika Project” will aim at building tourism infrastructure and bringing development to the island, but at what cost? This two-part blog series will look into how tourism has already changed the face of Indonesia as well as what can be expected in terms of future changes to the economic and community aspects of Lombok.

The superyacht industry isn’t the most environmentally friendly of industries and it often receives negative press when it comes to sustainability, from the endless single use plastic, the food miles consumed to the huge emissions.

Quite simply, it is an industry which relies on the health of our oceans and without them, cannot exist. In recent years, there has been an increase in environmental awareness and changing attitudes within the industry.

The process for change is happening in many ways but one is down to the power of the individual, individual yacht crew making changes to the daily operations of the yacht and taking responsibility for the yachts environmental footprint to provide long lasting benefits. So, what are the steps in which yacht crew can take to flip unsustainable practices onboard? Continue reading to find out!

River cruises are becoming increasingly popular, which creates many new opportunities as well as challenges along with it.

In Europe alone, 1.4 million passengers took a river cruise in 2018, a number that’s rising annually. The kind of growth that we’ve seen from cruise tourism has placed a large burden on the marine environment. As a result, we have generally seen a rise in the trend of customers demanding for more responsible and sustainable tourism. To meet the increasing demand for sustainable cruising options, river cruise companies are starting to think about their environmental impact while finding ways on how to reduce it.

In this blog, you’ll find a list of 11 suggested practices that we’ve compiled to help make river cruising more sustainable!

While getting ready for a long awaited vacation, you know all the tricks for packing light and smart - but what about packing zero waste? Tourism is one of the biggest industries in the world and it has a significant impact on our environment. By making small changes while traveling, you can help cut down your plastic waste footprint and make your tourist behavior more sustainable. Continue reading this article for some useful tips and tricks!

Have you heard of the #trashtag challenge? Around the world locals and tourists have come together to clean up parks, rivers and beaches, giving them new life.

This week, we’ll be featuring Scuba Projects, an initiative to spread awareness about ocean conservation while engaging the local community to lead the charge towards stopping plastic pollution by taking part in cleanups! If you haven’t already, check out their viral cleanup video here, which was one of many cleanups that they hosted across the country of Vietnam.

Keep reading to hear more about how Scuba Projects was founded, what their reception has been like so far and their future ambitions and projects!

Did you know that almost every piece of plastic ever made is still on the planet in some form or another? Plastic production globally is expected to be more than 3 hundred million tons. By 2050, when the population explodes to almost 10 billion people, it’s expected that plastic production will triple. The problem with that is that today, only a fraction of the plastic we produce is recycled.

In this week’s blog, we’ll take a look at 6 different brands that are incorporating marine plastics into their practices and retail products. We hope that this will inspire more brands to use ocean plastic in the creation of their products!

In this week’s blog we’ll be showcasing an upcoming documentary series by Gemtrack Travel called Positive Pioneers, and in particular Metamorfosa: an episode highlighting a village in Indonesia that has come together to restore its natural beauty including its surrounding waters and coral reefs.

The documentary shows the dedication that the community has committed to bringing their 5 km of local reefs back to life as well as the solution of building the relationships between all the levels of society to make projects like this replicable and successful in areas around the world!

Beautiful both visually and in its story, this documentary is awaiting its highly anticipated release at the end of this month, so take a look at this blog for a preview and stay tuned for its release! In the meantime also check out the documentary website here to learn more about this project and how you can support it!

This week Sea Going Green will dive into the topic of bridging the gap for women working towards ocean conservation by facilitating awareness about gender equality to encourage women to be a part of the solution, no matter what their educational background, ethnicity or socioeconomic status is.

For Farah of Women4Oceans, bridging the gap means empowering women to get a seat at the table allowing them to gain equal exposure and recognition for their efforts in ocean conservation.

Check out the rest of the blog to hear more about Farah’s motivation for starting Women4Oceans as well as projects and initiatives that they are doing to promote female visibility!

If you’re like me, you love seafood and probably won’t stop eating it anytime soon. But, do you really know where it comes from, and what kind of impact it has on the environment?

What if I told you that some of the lobster you eat could be causing irreversible damage to our ocean’s most threatened species? In this post you’ll find out some tips to avoid unsustainable seafood and how to use your wallet in a more environmentally conscious way.

Sea Going Green recently had the pleasure to interview Iris Overeem from the Recycled Island Foundation, a non-profit based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands to discuss their efforts to solve the issue of plastic pollution!

Their “plastic traps” catch floating plastic and upcycle it to close the loop by making it into a floating island structure, which can also function as an urban space for biodiversity and also city dwellers!

Check out this week’s blog to find out more about what inspired this project, how it works and its ambitions to become a new urban solution!

Imagine one day when you think of tourism, the first thing that comes to your mind is leaving behind a positive impact on the local community and environment when you leave. This is a world that we dream of, which is why Sea Going Green is thrilled to announce our partnership with the Impact Travel Alliance, which has built a community of passionate travelers and sustainability enthusiasts, who believe that all tourism should be sustainable!

Check out this week’s blog to hear more about the mission of the Impact Travel Alliance from founder, Kelley Louise! You can also read more about the efforts the non-profit is doing to make a difference and how you can join their chapter events, now being held in 20 cities worldwide!

Sea Going Green is excited to announce its partnership with PlanBlue! Their smart technology can automatically analyze seafoors. It can for example visualize the health status of the seafloor making it easily understandable to policy makers, the general public, but also coastal managers. We at Sea Going Green can’t wait to start working together with PlanBlue on future projects to help the marine tourism industry to #GoGreenForTheBigBlue!

In this week’s blog, you’ll hear more about how the DiveRay works and the ways that the data gathered from it can help solve the biggest problems facing our oceans. Take a look at the inspiring work PlanBlue has done by getting an inside look at the motivation and future of this technology in our interview with CEO, Joost Den Haan.

Ropeless Fishing.

Certainly, those two words don’t belong next to one another, right? Well, I’m glad you’re wrong.

Australia started it, Canada followed suite, New Zealand wanted a piece of the action, and now the United States is interested. Fishers in these countries (and more) have begun one of the most significant changes in the age-old fishing profession. Check out this week’s blog to learn more about why this change is so significant and how it can help revolutionize the fishing industry.

When you think of Florida, what comes to your mind?

Do you imagine white sandy beaches and clear green-blue water with dolphins and manatees glittering the coastline? Most of the time this is what locals and tourists can expect, but unfortunately a rare but recurring phenomenon called “Red Tide” has been leaving beaches and surrounding sea life devastated.

If you’ve been following Sea Going Green’s social media lately, you’ve probably seen some coverage from the beach cleanup we planned on New Years Eve at Clearwater Beach. While most of our focus on the cleanup had to do with raising awareness on the effects of plastic pollution, we couldn’t help but notice that the abundance of “Red Tide” was just as much of a concern for locals and attendees as pollution. Therefore, I’d like to shed some light on this issue as well as what can be done in the future to limit its effects on marine life and the tourism industry.