Belated Happy Earth Day!

This is coming in late but a belated Happy Earth Day to everyone!

I would've posted this earlier but the week of Earth Day was one of the busiest I've had this year so far. Our corporate social responsibility organization at work had been planning and organizing a charity run for months, and one of our two beneficiaries is the environmental NGO Haribon (the other is Kythe, an NGO that helps pediatric patients). These two NGOs were our beneficiaries in last year's charity run and we decided to keep them as beneficiaries this year. Since we knew already that the run would be in support of Haribon, we scheduled the event on April 24, around the same time as Earth Day (April 22), making it our official Earth Day event this year.

I also thought it would be a good idea to get Haribon to give an environmental talk as part of the Earth Day celebration. We invited employees who were interested to learn more about what Haribon does and what we can do to help the environment. To make sure that all interested parties could attend these talks, I organized one session in each of our three office sites. The talks turned out to be really good. One of the most interesting things I learned is that people who drive, jet-set, and use a lot of electrical appliances and equipment like air conditioners and computers need to plant nineteen (19) trees a year to compensate for the carbon footprint they leave behind. (So it seems I still have a lot of catching up to do!)

Interestingly enough, I've been learning a lot more about how to care for the environment better in the last few weeks. Our Earth Hour campaign back in March led me to do some research on ec0-friendly products since we wanted to give special prizes out to a couple of Earth Hour participants. We ended up buying stuff from Echo Store. If you check out their website, you will see that their products are environment friendly, sustain marginalized, indigenous and creative communities, support poverty alleviation programs, are created with fair labor practices, are animal-friendly, and express Filipino design excellence. They have a store in Serendra and a smaller one in Podium.

The environmental sustainability focus area of our CSR org is now working on doing research on proper waste disposal. Hopefully we can identify partners that correctly dispose of different types of waste - i.e. food waste, cans, plastic bottles, paper, and electronic waste - and work with them. Not sure if our research will amount to anything but if I do learn something useful, I'll post it here.