Earth Day 2026: Dozens of Ways To Get Involved
By Eileen Ogintz
Tribune Content Agency
Taking the Kids
Ready to get your hands dirty? Earth Day 2026 is April 22 with dozens of ways to get involved cleaning up our planet – and helping to make it healthier – whether you are home or traveling.
Join a community cleanup or tree planting. Shop at a local farmer’s market. Say no to fast fashion. When shopping for souvenirs, look for those produced where you are visiting.
Has everyone in your family got a reusable water bottle? Plastic pollution is one of the most important environmental problems that we face today. It impacts the environment and our health. Break free from using plastic water bottles. Let the kids’ and your own reusable bottles become souvenirs when you slap stickers from where you are visiting all over them.
Turn down the AC and turn off the lights when you leave a hotel room or vacation rental. Recycle. Reuse your towels.
Take public transport, walk or bike, that’s the best way to explore a new city. In Europe or Japan, consider the growing number of high-speed train options.
You’re not alone in paying attention to how your travel impacts the environment and the places you are visiting. The Virtuoso Luxe Report identifies sustainability as a growing driver of luxury travel decisions, while American Express Travel’s Global Travel Trends Report notes rising demand for trips that support conservation and local communities in practical ways, not just on paper.
According to Booking.com’s 2025 Travel & Sustainability Report, travelers increasingly prioritize destinations that reinvest tourism dollars locally. The Adventure Travel Trade Association, meanwhile, predicts that travelers, especially younger demographics and luxury segments, will increasingly select brands that can show measurable contribution, not just well-intentioned sustainability practices.
The theme for this year’s Earth Day is “Our Power, Our Planet.” Record-breaking heat across large parts of the globe, devastating wildfires destroying communities and habitats and ongoing social justice movements have made travelers more aware of the need for travel that goes beyond doing no harm and gives back to local communities and the environment.
While the Trump administration took more than 400 actions that are causing damage to the global environment, each of us can do our part. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, people from every walk of life – farmers and ranchers, faith leaders and scientists, health professionals and first responders, students and families, have helped drive initiatives that have delivered healthier air and water, lowered costs and embraced sustainability.
Travel lighter, National Geographic suggests, making it easier to travel, especially if you are walking or using public transport.
Seek out LEED-certified accommodations and the growing number of travel and tourism companies that are actively adopting sustainable practices and communicating them to consumers. Booking.com, for example, now has third-party sustainability certification information displayed. Consider websites including myecoescape that specialize in stays that are sustainable.
Fort Myers, Florida, is taking a leadership role through its partnership with Kind Traveler’s Every Stay Gives Back program. Participating hotels and vacation rentals contribute a portion of each stay to local nonprofits through Kind Traveler’s platform.Guests can see Positive Impact Dashboards and check out on-site QR codes showing how funds raised impacted the destination, as well as search for volunteer opportunities.
You can search on the platform for destinations, glamping experiences, luxury resorts around the world where every guest stay will help support local programs – everywhere from California cities and towns to the Oregon coast to Los Cabos.
Intrepid Travel prominently labels trip itineraries with their carbon impact and offsets emissions automatically. Iberostar leverages AI technology to reduce food waste in its
hotels and prioritizes underutilized fish stocks. Hilton has equipped over 1,800 hotels with EV charging points.
Some 267 cruise ships are capable of producing freshwater on board and 225 are equipped with advanced wastewater treatment systems, with systems that reduce emissions and use sustainable fuels, according to the Cruise Lines International Association.
Through its Zero Waste Box program, TerraCycle offers a straightforward way to collect and recycle items like used hotel amenity bottles and worn-out luggage that would otherwise be sent to landfills or incinerators. “It’s easy to focus on destinations and experiences while overlooking what travel uses up,” said Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, a leader in innovative sustainability solutions. Once received, the collected materials are recycled into pellets that are used by manufacturers to make new products, helping keep hard-to-recycle items out of landfills and incinerators, including backpacks, duffels and luggage.
Companies, including REI, Patagonia, allow you to return old gear to be repurposed or recycled. Green Guru Gear collects old bike tubes, wetsuits and climbing ropes for upcycling. If you’ve got Cotopaxi gear or apparel, you can trade it in via Cotopaxi Más Vida and get a digital gift card in return.
Across Southern Africa, high-end travelers are increasingly choosing smaller lodgesthat build lightly, leave little behind and operate with restraint. But that doesn’t mean compromising on the experience.
At Thonga Beach Lodge, inside South Africa’s UNESCO iSimangaliso Wetland Park, for example, structures are raised on wooden stilts and lodge lighting is carefully managed so it cannot be seen from the beach and potentially disrupt turtle nesting. Tsowa Safari Island on the Zambezi River is run entirely on solar power.
In Belize, family owned The Lodge at Chaa Creek in the rain forest has been a leader in the country’s sustainability tourism effort with everything from solar panels to producing their own water, composting kitchen waste used in the vegetable gardens and many more initiatives. Each year, the Lodge hosts and educates hundreds of local and overseas students and sponsors internship positions in ecotourism and responsible travel through programs here.
“At Chaa Creek, your journey becomes a living contribution to conservation, ensuring these wonders thrive for generations to come. Together, we turn travel into a force for good,” promise the Fleming family.
Consider that wherever you go next.
(For more Taking the Kids, visit www.takingthekids.com and also follow TakingTheKids on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where Eileen Ogintz welcomes your questions and comments. The fourth edition of The Kid’s Guide to New York City and the third edition of The Kid’s Guide to Washington D.C. are the latest in a series of 14 books for kid travelers published by Eileen.)
©2026 Eileen Ogintz. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.