Eco-friendly: how we try to make a difference

Ecolodge Tubagua is helping to bring travelers into the real Dominican Republic, channeling tourism dollars directly to the people and their communities while stimulating jobs and opportunity in rural areas and enabling the kind of interchanges and cultural exchanges between people which can be even more enriching and educational for the visitors as they are for the local people. See The Tourist Highway Project

Tubagua Ecolodge wins the Atabey national environmental award

SANTO DOMINGO, June 30, 2016–Tubagua Ecolodge was one of this year’s seven winners of the Eigth Annual Atabey Awards, a nationally televised program dedicated to raising environmental consciousness in the Dominican Republic. Tubagua received the award for sustainable tourism. Other award categories include community, conservation, training, alternative energy and corporate initiative and personal initiative.
The Atabey Innovation Center is an NGO dedicated to sustainable development through environmental preservation throughout the Dominican Republic and to promoting a national culture of environmental

Tubagua Ecolodge Sustainable Practices


Environment
• Our lodge installation takes up less than 10% of the plantation property, allowing for the natural existence indigenous plants and wildlife.
• We have eliminated animal herds and only grow plants and trees.
• Bath and kitchen water is used for irrigation. Toilets flow into a sceptic tank with a deep rock-filled seepage cavity. Guests are expected to cooperate with water and energy conservation.
• Our electrical draw for 36 guests is <5Kw, less than a typical American home.
• We recycle all food residue as fertilizer or animal feed.
• We have recycled thousands of used rubber tires into retention walls and stairs, permanently put to good use by burying, not burning. This type of retention wall is also very drainage friendly, allowing the free flow of ground water and not causing destructive erosion.

Community
• Tubagua supports Community Tourism. We helped to create a community non-profit organization that now receives income from several visitor experiences, including a coffee tour where visitors plant thousands of coffee seedlings each year that get donated to local family growers.
• Tubagua regularly hosts volunteer and service groups who help in the community with medical clinics, school improvements and other projects
• We share our well water with neighbors; a resource they did not have before.
• We have created collaborative garden patches that provide local familities 50 per cent of the crops.
• We purchase as much locally grown produce as possible.
• Our staff is 90% from local communities.
• We use manual labor instead of machines whenever possible.
• Our structures are almost all handmade using for the most part renewable wood and roofing materials purchased from wood farms.