Welcome to Bay Flats Lodge, our luxury fishing and hunting lodge on the Texas Coast! During our on-going ecological season at Bay Flats Lodge, we are proud to showcase our environmental promise called The Zero Plastic Initiative. As a promise to the environment and local waterways, we vow to protect these waters for future generations of anglers and fish alike. If you subscribe to our newsletters, or visited the Lodge this year, you know we are eliminating all usage of plastics. Getting rid of Styrofoam cups was the very first step in this process. Our partnership with Yeti allows us to issue guests a Yeti Low-Ball cup for personal use throughout their stay. The rewards here are doubled in that we get rid of Styrofoam, and our guests truly love their Yeti’s.
No Plastic on Boats
As we continue with our Zero Plastic Initiative, the second part to our initiative includes eliminating single-use plastic. We are removing plastic water bottles on our boats, and at the Lodge. As a daily courtesy for each boat, we issue a Yeti backpack containing two one-gallon Yeti jugs filled with ice and drinking water. To accompany the gallon jugs in each backpack are six Yeti Rambler drinking bottles, each also filled with ice and drinking water. We assign a bottle to each guest on the boats, and replenish the reusable bottles throughout the day.
Daily Sanitation
The boat backpacks are collected daily and are sanitized via industrial-grade dishwashers made possible via our partnership with Ecolab. After sanitization, our guides fill the jugs and drinking bottles with ice and water at a commercial recharge station. Our guides then pack the backpacks with the freshly-recharged jugs and bottles and store them in a climate-controlled environment. The next morning, we keep the backpacks chilled and ready for another day on the water with our guides and guests.
Lodge Drinking Water
At the lodge, we also provide a solution to remove plastic water bottles in our daily operations. We want to be able to provide each Bay Flats Lodge property their own source of fresh drinking water. To achieve that goal we partner with Culligan to supply each property with its own reverse osmosis drinking water system. To keep our guests hydrated, this provides guests an endless supply of fresh, clean drinking water regardless of where they stay during their visit.
Other Solutions During Ecological Season at Bay Flats Lodge
At Bay Flats, our Pro Shop also needed an upgrade. The pro shop presents a need for a different solution to rid our daily operations of the use of plastic. In prior years, we used to supply our guests with an elegantly printed plastic shopping bag for all apparel purchases. We address the need to omit these plastic bags via the use of newly-designed paper shopping bags. The bags feature designs made of recycled and biodegradable materials with our new logo on the front of every bag.
In conclusion, continuing ecological season at Bay Flats Lodge we are also replacing plastic utensils and dishware in daily operations. For our guests, gone are the days of serving evening appetizers on plastic plates with plastic forks. And, as we move forward, our Bay Flats Lodge guests will now be served appetizers on real plates with true silverware. To put it quite simply, we’re quitting all utilization of single use plastic items wherever possible.