After a great experience last year, The Joinery is again participating in the NW Earth Institute’s EcoChallenge. With over 80% of our employees taking part, our Sustainability Team divided participants into four separate teams for an added layer of fun and friendly competition. The team came up with a new set of challenges:
- Challenge #1: Don’t eat anything that once had a heartbeat. Whatever your take on the ethics of eating animals, a diet featuring meat and poultry has a dramatically bigger environmental footprint than a vegetarian diet. There is ample evidence that reducing meat intake also improves your health. Our goal as a company is to reach 600 meatless meals.
- Challenge #2: Avoid to-go containers. A trash audit conducted earlier in the year (yes, our team shown below did some dumpster diving to determine what exactly we are throwing into the landfill) showed that about 10% of the trash from our Woodstock location was made up of to-go containers for food and coffee. Our goal is to eliminate the use of to-go containers in general and disposable coffee cups in particular, and to help we are providing insulated coffee containers to all participating employees.
- Challenge #3: Daily Exercise for at least 30 minutes has a beneficial impact on mental as well as physical health. And it can also be a lot of fun.
We are kicking the Eco Challenge off with a Vegetarian Luncheon this Thursday, when our four teams will begin battling it out for bragging rights.
October 4, 2016
