ABSTRACT
Tourism services are as susceptible as any other business activity to the imperatives of contemporary environmentalism, which most simply expressed means ‘going green’: “ . . . an approach which refl ects much greater awareness of the interconnectedness of the economic, the physical and social dimensions of the environment rather than just the physical or natural e.g. pollution and damage” (Leslie, 2005: 251). Through the processes involved in the provision of products and services, which are largely fossil-fuel dependent (Kelly & Williams, 2007; Mintel, 2007), tourism enterprises generate pollution and waste, thereby placing additional burdens on the locality, the infrastructure, and wider environment to handle these by-products. At the same time, they generate employment opportunities and socio-cultural benefi ts for many people within the host community and possibly support environmental initiatives (see Blanco et al., 2008). However, the provision of tourism supply is dominated by small and mediumsize enterprises (SME) within which category the majority of enterprises are “micro-businesses,” i.e., less than ten employees. At the individual level these enterprises might be seen to be missing in environmental terms. But aggregated, their energy consumption and waste become substantial and thus tourism per se is a major polluter, and largely unregulated (Leslie, 2006). It is not diffi cult to concur with Blair and Hitchcock (2001) that, in comparison with most other sectors of consumer services, tourism overall has the most substantial negative impacts.
