At Relinea, we are passionate about being more environmentally conscious, helping to promote sustainability, and enhancing teamwork within our organisation.
In honour of Earth Day, we have been looking at Earth Day activities to do with our colleagues at work to celebrate planet Earth.
The first thing we did was look at how we can help reduce, reuse, and recycle. To reduce our environmental impact we have a recycling system in place. One thing this was missing was a how-to recycle guide for colleagues on what can be recycled. You may be surprised how many people don’t know what can and can’t be recycled. To solve this problem, we put clear and helpful posters at all our recycling points.
Email is one of the most popular forms of communication at work, but it can also be a major source of clutter. According to the Washington Post, a person’s emails analysed over a year would represent a massive 300 pounds of carbon footprint, or about 200 miles driving a basic car.
For Earth Day, we took the time to remind our colleagues to take a few minutes to declutter their inbox and help reduce the office’s environmental impact. We encouraged everyone to delete any old emails that they no longer need and to unsubscribe from newsletters they never read.
Not only will this free up storage space on the company’s email servers, but it will also help save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, it will make it easier to find important emails when they are needed.
As Earth Day coincides with the start of Spring, we decided this is the perfect time to start a Relinea Vegetable Garden. Creating a vegetable garden will be a great way for us all to eat fresh, healthy food, while contributing to the environment.
By reducing our consumption of food grown hundreds or maybe thousands of miles away, our carbon footprint will decrease. In 2020, it was reported that 84% of fruit and 44% of vegetables in the UK had been imported. In commercial farming, pesticides are used to treat crops to protect them from pests and diseases that could damage or destroy them. By growing our own produce, we will decide what goes onto the plants and into the soil.
Throughout the company we reuse items wherever possible, from boxes to reusable water bottles and cups. Water.org states that 7.7 billion plastic water bottles are used in the UK each year, with the average person in the UK now using 150 plastic water bottles every year – that’s more than 3 a week. Many are discarded, and end up polluting our rivers and seas. Staggeringly if just 1 in 10 of us refilled just once a week, we’d save around 340 million plastic bottles a year.
Overall, we have learned a lot this Earth Day, and we can’t wait to reap the rewards from our vegetable box in the coming months.
