Take your cup!
I recently sat in on a webinar run by Impact Dragonfly as part of their collaborative insights into sustainability webinar series, and was shocked to learn that Australians throw out over 1.8 billion coffee cups each year. Coffee and other hot beverage cups are estimated to be the second largest contributor to litter after plastic bottles, and up to 90% of single use hot beverage cups end up in landfill - equating to around 60,000 kg of plastic per annum.
We NEED to care about this. We need to think about waste and what we consume - both privately and professionally . This world is finite and how we treat it today impacts what will happen tomorrow.
At O'Connells OBM our sustainability journey is still in it's infancy (more on that another day), but, in living our core values (one being CARE) and our mission to have a positive impact, we have been making a concerted effort to implement a number of initiatives that support environmental stewardship - most recently implementing a waste management system that gets all of us thinking about our consumption and how we handle waste. It's exciting and empowering to work with an organisation that understands the important role that businesses have to play in reducing our environmental impact.
We could talk for days about this, and we should. But we also need to act, everyday - and this one is easy to do: before you walk in to the coffee shop on your way in to work, keep walking upstairs and grab a cup - every action counts.
We are closely following all companies which are doing things more sustainably and are looking forward to actions that make difference and eventually lead you to achievement of the goals. Hope to see your application as well in Baltic Sustainability Awards. This year there will be special category for Design solutions as well.