- 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.
We are hoping for results similar to our 2015 EcoChallenge, which included the following:
- Challenge #1: Vegetarian challenge: Go a whole day without eating any meat:
- Result: Total of 203 meatless days, including 5 employees who didn’t eat meat for the entire 15-day challenge (and one who converted to a vegetarian diet as a result of his experience).
- Challenge #2: Printing challenge: Reduce out the use of printer paper by cutting out non-essential printing.
- Result: Overall 38% reduction. This thoughtful printer usage has continued and resulted in less paper usage year over year.
- Challenge #3: Eliminate our use of paper towels.
- Result: We switched to reusable napkins, and have eliminated paper towels from use going forward..
If you would like get involved with the 2016 EcoChallenge you sign up here.