Shoor Safaris stops offering Plastic Bottled Water on its Kenya Safari Holidays

Shoor Safaris, a Nairobi based tour company has announced it will stop using plastic water bottles on all their African Safari holiday packages in Kenya and East Africa starting 01st November 2017. It has been standard practice in the Kenya travel industry to offer safari tourists with bottled water in their vehicles during game drives in the various National parks and game reserves such as Masai Mara, Amboseli and Lake Nakuru. However, tourists booking their safaris with Shoor will now be requested to bring along their own refillable bottles with the operator then supplying clean filtered drinking water from reusable 20 liter water cylinders. Refillable glass and steel bottles will also be available to buy at minimal cost for those clients who will not have carried their own water containers.

”Our decision follows the commendable lead taken by the Government of Kenya in introducing one of the toughest plastic bag bans in the world”, said Hiral Bhuva, Reservations Manager at Shoor Safaris. The travel company is taking this significant step to encourage personal self-regulation among all Safari and Beach vacation tourists visiting Kenya to curb the use of plastic bottled water and halt the ongoing damage inflicted on the environment in the entire East African region including Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Plastic related pollution of the oceans and the environment at large has reached alarming proportions. Prior to the current plastic bag ban, it was estimated that 100 million plastic bags were handed to Kenyans in supermarkets alone, not counting those used in the informal retail sector. These bags have long been linked to serious environmental pollution that also impacts Kenya’s wildlife and marine related tourism. Travelers enjoying their Safari in Kenya would themselves express the need to limit plastic waste to conserve the stunning beauty of the Kenyan countryside and protect the region’s tourism industry.

Plastic bottles, presently not covered in the ban, are an equally serious threat to the environment and a growing eyesore in a nation which prides itself on its famous natural attractions including its incredibly diverse wildlife which lures tourists from around the world. It is thought that 50 million bottles are used in Kenya every year with the majority of these not being recycled. Safari operators generally include two bottles of drinking water every day for tourists on Safari. Considering Kenya receives close to 900,000 tourists annually, even only a portion of this number using and disposing these plastic bottles results in millions of tonnes of plastic waste coming into the eco system every year. A single plastic bottle takes anything from 450 to 1000 years to fully degrade.

Current evidence indicates that a large proportion of this plastic waste eventually finds its way into the oceans, killing marine and bird life thereby causing irreversible damage to the environment, including turning pristine beaches into plastic dump sites. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which incidentally has its head quarters in Nairobi, at current rates, by 2050 the oceans of the world will contain more plastic than fish. In response, the UN has now declared a war on pollution with their ‘Clean Seas’ initiative.

For the rest of us all, it is now quite simply the time to stop ourselves from destroying our planet and to do our bit to reverse the damage to Nature.

To find out more about Shoor Safaris, visit their website at www.shoortravel.com

You can also email them at info@shoortravel.com

About Shoor Africa

Shoor Safaris is a reputed boutique Tour Operator based in Nairobi Kenya, offering customized Kenya Safari and African Safari Holidays in East Africa.