by Tori Sullivan, Account Executive

Here are some things you can do in your everyday life to take care of our planet

As employees safely return to the office, it’s important to take a moment to think about sustainable practices to incorporate into everyday life! By instilling more eco-friendly mindsets on a minor scale, we can make a major impact. In this blog I am sharing a few little ways this can be done.

Conscious Commute

While people are excited to return to the office, they are not enthralled to get back into their daily commute. As you start to consider your route back to the office, think about alternate forms of transportation such as walking, biking, public transportation and even carpooling with coworkers when comfortable! A single person who switches from a 20-mile commute alone by car to existing public transportation can reduce their annual CO2 emissions by 20 pounds per day, or more than 48,000 pounds in a year.

Lunch Smart

I know that the hot spots around the office are sorely missed but it’s best that you don’t indulge in them too much, for both your wallet and the environment’s sake. Between the single-use plastics used in delivery bags, packaging, and utensils and numerous menus printed that all end up in landfills, packing a lunch in your reusable containers is far more sustainable for the environment. Also, make sure to invest in a set of cutlery for the office for those times that the bosses buy lunch- just say no to single-use utensils!

Saving Power, Data and Resources

An eye-opening statistic that recently hit this office is that cramped email inboxes are actually causing a negative effect on the environment, not just your productivity.  Something you might not know is that most emails (including spam ones) are generally stored on the cloud which requires electricity. According to The Good Planet, nearly 107 billion spam emails are sent and received a day. If every person only deleted 10 of those emails, they could save 1,725,00 GB of storage space and around 55.2 million KW of power. Quick! Go and delete those 3-year-old emails you know you’re never going to need, and while you’re at it, unsubscribe from those pesky emails you never read- no reason for them to be clogging up your inbox.

Shop Secondhand

While planning your return to the office and thinking about hopping out of your sweatpants, consider shopping secondhand to refresh your wardrobe! By shopping secondhand, you can keep clothes out of landfills, lower your carbon footprint and help to preserve water that is used to make new clothes. Another great way that thrifting helps the planet is that it reduces the chemical pollution induced by creating and buying new clothes. By going to your local thrift store or even shopping through online platforms such as ThredUp, Poshmark or Curtsy, you can not only save yourself some change but also make a change.

By taking these practices into effect every day, not just during Earth Week, we can make a big impact to save our natural resources and this beautiful planet we all call home!