Our fight against rubbish

Our fight against rubbish

For every booking above 600 Euro Balkan Natural Adventure will fund at least 15 litres of rubbish removal from the Peaks of the Balkans Trail.
Adventure and natural tourism is more than a business. It is a passion it is delivered only when people love doing their job. Think of a guide who does not love mountains or a guide that will litter during you hike. It would spoil everything.

Balkan Natural Adventure is founded by passion and we see that our work in making our mountains known is making them vulnerable to littering and pollution.

We can not change the world but we can make a mark and make a difference. (Join us for our first collective action 4 may 2019: [email protected])

How are we going to remove the rubbish 

There are three ways that we will implement this task: The guide walking with you will collect while hiking removing litter from the bare nature or how it is now nicknamed plogging; Your luggage transfer people while walking with horses will collect rubbish on their way, and we will take special actions with our guides to collect the littering.

Engagement of guides to collect litter during the hike or Plogging has its backdrop as clients may think they are not the priority during the hike. This will influence the quality of our service. We do not want this to happen this is why the guides will take the task and get the bonus payment only when the clients will agree to the project and have the guide discretely remove trash. This task is always complicated as the guide will not be able to remove the trash down in the city, thus leaving it next to guest houses the action may risk the littering going back to the nature. However Balkan Natural Adventure will look at all the possibilities in mitigating this risk.

Engagement of the luggage transfer service in collecting the litter has its own backdrop. As most of the litter is on the trails the luggage transfer does not use the same trails as the hikers do. Sometimes less steep trails are used and sometimes they take shortcuts, thus not making an impact in some of the trail sections. However, even against this backdrop the project can be implemented as this will bring extra funds to the local service provider.

Cleaning actions are very effective however their backdrop is that they are usually concentrated in one part of the trail. Usually bigger pollution sites are targeted.

This is why Balkan Natural Adventure will make a combination of these three actions that will impact in protecting our bread and butter and offering a better service to our clients.

Quality control and tracking

When we engage our guides the need for quality control is not very high as the trust and the passion for the project is the same. Our guides do litter collection and litter control without any incentives. However we will request our guides to keep track of their engagement in litter removal during the hikes. This will be reported in our web site with photos and numbers.

When we will engage the luggage transfer the control will be stricter as these are contractors outside company and not always passionate about mountains. However we have a high level of trust with them so there will be reporting, photographs in order to make sure our donation will go in its right place.

The collective work will be the easiest to track as us as the founders of the company will be personally engaged in litter removal. These actions will be effective as there will be volunteers participating which will add value to our funding.

Profiting 

We believe we will attract bookings with our Corporate Social Responsibility actions, but this is not the reason we are doing this action. The reason is to protect our bread and butter which is pristine mountains. We hope we will reflect positively at the market and this will not be our advantage in the market but a standard practice for all companies in the world. We hope it will be a worldwide trend that will be copycatted by other companies in the region and we may impact Himalayas who need a general clean up.