Sustainable travel guide to Iceland

Where the planet shows you how it works

Iceland is the rare destination where the landscape itself does the teaching. You stand near a steaming vent and feel, viscerally, why the country runs on geothermal heat. You watch a glacier calve and understand, without anyone needing to explain, what's at stake. For a place barely larger than Ireland with a population smaller than Coventry's, Iceland has become a strange kind of climate classroom — one where the lesson plan involves waterfalls, lava fields, and the occasional puffin. It's also a country that has quietly built one of the cleanest energy systems on Earth, which makes it an unusually honest place to travel sustainably. Honest, but not effortless. Here's how to do it well.

Why Iceland punches above its weight on green travel

Iceland generates the overwhelming majority of its electricity and heating from renewables — primarily hydropower and geothermal. That's not greenwashing; it's geology. The country sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two tectonic plates pull apart and serve up heat the way other countries serve up coal. What this means for you, practically, is that the long shower in your guesthouse, the heated outdoor pool in a tiny fishing village, and the lights in the Reykjavík café are all running on energy with a far smaller carbon footprint than almost anywhere else you'll travel.

The catch — and there is one — is that flying to Iceland and driving around it can quickly undo that advantage. The country's emissions story is overwhelmingly about transport, tourism, and heavy industry, not households. So sustainable Iceland isn't about the country trying harder. It's about you travelling in a way that matches what's already there.

When to go (and why "shoulder" is the answer)

Summer brings the midnight sun, accessible highlands, and every other tourist on the planet. Winter brings the northern lights, ice caves, and short, sharp days. Both are spectacular. Both are also crowded in the headline spots and put pressure on small communities along the Ring Road.

The shoulder months — roughly May, early June, September, and early October — are the quiet sweet spot. You'll find:

• Long enough days to drive comfortably without rushing
• Fewer cars at the famous waterfalls, which means a better experience and less wear on infrastructure
• Better availability at smaller, locally owned guesthouses
• Lower prices on flights and rentals, which lets you spend longer in fewer places — itself a more sustainable approach

If you can travel slow and travel off-peak, you've already done more for green travel Iceland than any swap of plastic straws will achieve.

Getting there, and getting around

Let's be honest about flying. There's no rail tunnel under the North Atlantic, and there isn't going to be. If you're coming from Europe or North America, you're flying. The most useful thing you can do is fly direct, fly economy, and stay long enough to make the trip count. A long weekend in Reykjavík has a worse footprint per day on the ground than a fortnight that takes in the south coast, the East Fjords, and a stretch of the north.

Once you land, the options stack up roughly like this:

• Public coaches and the Strætó network connect Reykjavík to many towns and are a genuinely viable option for travellers who aren't trying to cover the whole country in a week.
• Electric vehicle rentals are increasingly available, and Iceland's charging network has expanded along the Ring Road. EVs make particular sense given how the grid is powered.
• Shared 4x4 tours are a sensible alternative to renting your own off-roader for a day in the highlands. One vehicle, several travellers, less impact.
• Cycling is for the committed and the patient — wind is the national sport — but cycle touring along the south coast in summer is a thing of beauty.

Whatever you choose, the cardinal rule of eco Iceland driving is simple: stay on marked roads. Off-road driving is illegal because Icelandic moss and lichen take decades to recover from a single tyre track. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, and the fines reflect it.

Where to stay, without falling for greenwash

You don't need a recommended-by-celebrities eco-lodge to stay sustainably in Iceland. The country's energy mix means most accommodation is already running on relatively clean power. The differentiator is what the property does on top of that — and how it treats the place around it.

What to look for:

• Recognised certifications such as the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, Green Key, or the EU Ecolabel. These actually audit. They're not self-declared.
• Locally owned guesthouses and farm stays, especially outside Reykjavík. Money stays in the community, and farmers often have the strongest interest in the land staying intact.
• Geothermal-heated properties — many smaller hotels and guesthouses use direct geothermal heat, which is about as low-impact as warmth gets.
• Transparent water and waste policies. If a hotel can tell you where its water comes from and how it handles waste in a remote location, that's a good sign.

Be sceptical of properties that lean hard on aesthetic — moss walls, "wellness," handwritten cards about reusing towels — without anything verifiable underneath. A good rule of thumb: if their sustainability page is all adjectives and no nouns, keep looking.

Eating Iceland, sustainably

Iceland's food scene has changed dramatically in the last decade, and the most interesting restaurants are now built around local sourcing almost by default. The shopping list of what's actually grown, caught, or raised in Iceland is short and worth knowing:

• Fish — cod, haddock, arctic char, langoustine. Iceland's fisheries are tightly managed.
• Lamb — free-roaming, grass-fed, and a serious part of Icelandic identity.
• Skyr and dairy — local, traceable, and on every breakfast table.
• Greenhouse vegetables — tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and herbs grown under geothermal-heated glass. This is where Iceland gets genuinely interesting: salad in the Arctic, powered by the Earth.

What to ease up on: out-of-season imported produce, which has travelled a long way to reach a country with limited arable land. And if you're curious about traditional foods involving whale or puffin — both are still served in some tourist-facing restaurants — the conservation case for skipping them is strong, and most Icelanders themselves don't eat them.

The waterfalls, the geysers, and the etiquette nobody tells you

Iceland's most famous sites are loved nearly to death. Visiting them isn't the problem; visiting them badly is. A short etiquette list that costs you nothing:

1. Stay behind the ropes. They aren't suggestions. Soil erosion at the headline sites is a real and accelerating issue, and barriers exist because someone's already trampled what used to be there.
2. Pay for parking and toilets. Many sites are on private land or maintained by small communities. The few hundred krónur is how the place keeps existing.
3. Pack out everything. Including organic waste. Banana peels do not biodegrade meaningfully in a sub-Arctic climate.
4. Respect closures. If a trail's shut for revegetation, it's shut. There are roughly nine hundred other things to look at.
5. Drone responsibly. National parks have rules, nesting birds have nerves, and other travellers came for the silence.

Beyond the Golden Circle

The single most sustainable shift you can make in Iceland is to spread out. The Golden Circle and south coast carry an outsized share of the country's tourism load. The East Fjords, the Westfjords, and the north coast carry a fraction of it, and they are arguably more beautiful for it.

Consider:

• The Westfjords for dramatic empty roads, bird cliffs at Látrabjarg, and small fishing villages where tourism is a benefit rather than a burden.
• The north around Akureyri and Mývatn for geothermal landscapes minus the queues at Geysir, and some of the best whale-watching in Europe.
• The East Fjords for slow driving, reindeer sightings, and harbour towns that haven't been Instagrammed flat.

You'll have a better trip. The country will have a better visitor.

Souvenirs worth carrying home

Skip the puffin keychains made on the other side of the world. Iceland produces a small but genuine range of things worth bringing back: hand-knitted lopapeysa wool jumpers (look for the Icelandic Handknitting Association label to verify they were knitted locally), skyr-based skincare, salt harvested from Icelandic seawater, and small-batch chocolate. If a souvenir doesn't say where it was made, assume the answer is "not here."

Closing the loop

A trip to Iceland is, in the end, a negotiation: a long flight in exchange for a long, slow look at one of the planet's most articulate landscapes. The flight is the part you can't engineer away — but you can choose how you stay, where you eat, and how lightly you move once you're there. If you book your accommodation through IMPT, the carbon offset for your stay is handled on our side, on-chain, no fiddly add-ons at checkout. The IMPT Card and the partner Shop are useful for the kit you'll actually want — wool layers, a decent thermos, waterproofs that don't fall apart — and IMPT Tokens accumulate quietly in the background as you go. Useful tools, not a substitute for travelling well. Iceland will do the rest.