Environmental Policy

New Zealand Educational Tours (NZET) prides itself on offering the highest quality educational tours New Zealand wide and depends on a high quality natural environment to be able to deliver our product. We recognise that our tours and our head office will adversely affect the environment and are committed to implementing sound environmental practices both in the office and on tour, and encouraging suppliers to implement responsible tourism policies. Our policies are set out below: 

• Our standard practice is to use transport, accommodation and activity suppliers that carry the Qualmark. Most of our accommodation and activity suppliers are environmentally conscious and have well established practices, and our principal transport provider is Qualmarked. If we use operators who do not exhibit sensible sustainability practices, we will encourage them to develop these. If they do not develop them, we will reconsider our relationship with that operator. 
• Staff and Tour Managers partake in a training programme that is delivered annually.  This is to help them understand their environmental responsibilities and to communicate them to our clients. 
• We will inform staff, customers and the public about our environmental policies. All our customers are briefed on our sustainability policies on the first night of each tour, our policy is posted on our website and each tour carries a card advising clients on how to minimise the effects of their actions on the environment. During the tour, tour managers will continue to inform and educate our customers about protecting the environment, not only while in New Zealand. This is reinforced by our tour evaluation systems and tour manager bonus system. 
•  We will participate in community initiatives that care for and improve our environment.  Our proudest initiative is our support of the 'Save a Kiwi' programme.  This is run by Kiwi Encounter and aims to slow the decline of Kiwi's in NZ.  Click here for more information.
• Where possible we will source local products for our tours and employ local people for our head office site and for our tour guides. 
• We monitor significant environmental indicators on a regular basis, and aim to achieve reductions in waste production, energy use and fuel consumption.   
• We have adopted a waste minimisation, reuse and recycling system.  Currently we re-use paper for printing in the office. We print double sided whenever possible. We continually aim to reduce our consumption of paper and paper based products by maximising the use of internet hosted applications and documents. Surplus food from tours is redistributed e.g. to food banks or to users of the same accommodation. We recycle all we can in the office. We review environmental matters in our regular monthly meetings. 
• We contribute to our local community through a mix of participation in local events, sponsorship, taking board or management roles in local organisations, and attending networking events.