Salmon Berry Travel & Tours, a women-owned and operated small business, is one of Alaska’s premier tour operators. For the last fourteen and a half years our team of local Alaskans have specialized in small group Day Tours from Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Southcentral’s largest cruise ship ports, in addition to multi-day Curated Travel Packages throughout Alaska! Maintaining our standards of service, we have been offering complimentary bottled ‘Alaska glacier wellness water’ (and snacks) to all of our Day Tour guests!
Until the last winter season (2018/19), Salmon Berry distributed roughly 10,000 one-time-use plastic water bottles, filled with locally sourced glacier water, each year. Although we collected these one-time-use plastic water bottles to build a greenhouse (to minimize our contributions to landfills), 80% of all plastic water bottles become lasting waste in our landfills (approximately 38 billion one-time-use plastic water bottles annually) and in our oceans (approximately 8 million metric tons of plastic waste annually)! To combat this, Salmon Berry decided to take action and advance the industry standard of our state’s growing efforts to offer more sustainable tourism.
Salmon Berry moved in a more sustainable direction while continuing to offer a level of customer service that is expected. We set a goal to remove the need for one-time-use bottles and cups, in turn, minimizing our waste contribution, in turn having a low environmental impact on Alaska. We are beyond excited to say that we have succeeded! As a solution, we invested in shatter resistant, durable glass bottles to be provided during all of our Day Tours (1 for each guest — up to 13 per van). We also invested in a water filling system and a commercial dishwasher in our office, assuring that we supply clean and sanitary reusable water bottles, filled with high quality water.
Since implementing this project, Salmon Berry helped eliminate waste from over 4,500 one-time-use plastic water bottles (according to the counter on our water filling system)! We are excited to make this contribution, and hopefully inspire others to join us in action. Each year, Alaska receives over 2 million visitors from all over the world. With the increasing amount of travelers throughout the year exploring Alaska, Salmon Berry Travel & Tours looks towards the future of our pristine land and one of our state’s strongest sources of renewable income – tourism!