Wilderness Patagonia – Travel Company ® is the first Tour Operator in Argentina to be accepted as a signatory to the Global Tourism Plastics Initiative’s program of plastic reduction initiatives for tourism because the company has pioneered initiatives to reduce the use of plastics and carbon mitigation in its operations. The campaign is led by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Tourism Organization, in collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and has been developed within the framework of the One Planet Sustainable Tourism Program.

Companies and tourist destinations now have the opportunity to step forward as world leaders and stop plastic pollution and that is why it joins the initiative to address the causes in this type of pollution. The reduction campaign will allow companies and other interested agents to adopt concerted measures, leading by example the transformation towards circularity in the use of plastics.

The set of concrete and feasible objetives to achive by 2025 that will be asked to implement are:

• Eliminate problematic or unnecessary packaging and plastic items.
• Take steps to move from single-use models to reuse models or reusable alternatives.
• Commit the value chain to ensure that 100% of the plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable or compostable.
• Take steps to increase the amount of recycled content in all used plastic packaging and items.
• Collaborate and invest to increase recycling and composting rates for plastics.
• Report publicly every year on the progress made towards these goals.

Given that the problem of plastic pollution in tourism today is too much for an organization to “fix” on its own, changes need to be made throughout the tourism value chain to be able to cope with this problem. The initiative will support the tourism industry in the following ways:

• Sharing information about the challenge of plastic pollution and about the solutions that the sector is implementing.
• Encouraging procurement practices that consider the plastic footprint of products and services and encourage circularity in the use of plastics.
• Promoting innovation and facilitating cooperation between governments, local organizations and companies.
• Compiling progress reported by signatories and benchmarking the results.
• Communicating to the public the measures applied by the signatories and giving visibility to the leadership of the sector.

For Wilderness Patagonia – Travel Company ® it is an honor to be part of this initiative that is aligned with our purposes and objectives of adding, collaborating and creating sustainable and responsible tourism.