12 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day as a Business
Taking time to celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd as a small or medium-sized company can be a great team-building activity for your staff. Plus, employees increasingly want to work for businesses where sustainability is part of the mission. Here are some good-natured ways for entrepreneurs to mark the day in a positive atmosphere.
1. Offer green discounts to customers. For example, you can offer 20% off for customers who bring in their old products for recycling on Earth Day.
2. Hold a meatless potluck lunch with co-workers, or else set the theme as locally produced ingredients or organic food. Hopefully everyone will want to swap recipes at the end!
3. Pick up trash as a group in a local neighbourhood or park.
4. Plant a tree or trees.
5. Spend time with your team outside in nature on a walk or at a picnic.
6. Host a virtual cooking workshop with your group and share waste-free recipes, like potato peel chips.
7. Organize a free giveaway day for your staff: have people bring in their “free to a good home” goods to swap. At the end of the day, donate anything unclaimed to a second-hand store.
8. Hold a recycling drive and focus on a specific product like e-waste, giving staff a chance to unburden themselves of old phones and electronics.
9. Invite an environmental expert to give a presentation, such as a grad student in ecology who wants to describe their thesis work, or an expert to talk about energy efficiency in the workplace, or eco-friendly cleaning supplies.
10. Organize a bioblitz or citizen science project, where staff members contribute their observations of nature. For example, how many species of birds can you spot in an afternoon? Two projects to try are iNaturalist and Global Earth Challenge.
11. If there’s a zero-waste store nearby, bring in a supply of household products like dish soap or dish washer powder, then invite employees to re-fill their containers. As a bonus, stats enthusiasts might enjoy using the plastic calculator to see how much plastic waste they generate in a year.
12. Spend an afternoon going through the Earth Day Plastic Pollution Primer and Action Toolkit and brainstorm ideas on how your team could reduce the use of plastics at work and at home. Although it takes a little effort, it’s the kind of lasting impact that can leave everyone feeling a sense of accomplishment about their environmental footprint.
Earth Day is only one day, but saving Earth needs to happen 365 days of the year. So, if you’re looking for ways to make your company more environmentally friendly, check out the additional resources below.
BILINGUAL SOURCES:
https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-tips/
https://www.youngliving.com/blog/eu/en/22-ideas-to-celebrate-earth-day/
https://businesslink.ca/blog/5-ways-to-make-your-small-business-more-sustainable/
ENGLISH-ONLY SOURCES
https://breezy.hr/blog/earth-day-activities-for-work
https://www.pge.com/en/mybusiness/save/smbblog/article/celebrate_earth_day_by_going_green.page?