World Nature Conservation Day on Thursday 28th July is the United Nations General Assembly’s global day to preserve the environment and its natural resources, focusing on saving threatened plants and animals. In 2022 the theme is "cut down on plastic use". We know that plastic is a huge problem in our natural world and are graphically seeing the impact of it on our marine and land animals.
At Green&Blue we know that by nature of living within the human world as we all do, we can’t avoid having a degree of impact, but we can progressively work towards working with nature to help it, and actively and positively reducing our own impact.
5 things we are conscious of at Green&Blue that help to reduce our impact and conserve nature
Minimise use of plastic.While we could use and reuse plastic as a part of the supply chain, we realise that plastic has limited re-usability, it’s only kept in the recycling loop for a couple of uses before eventually being discarded, so instead we opt for taking a ‘no plastic’ approach, we collect clean cardboard through our Shred project for padding, avoid laminates on packaging and we tape boxes with non-plastic tape. This filters down to an office supplies level and even our bamboo loo roll is completely unwrapped. We refill our silicone free cleaning products from the local refill points.
Live Planet First.
Every decision we make as a business takes a planet first approach. We spend a lot of time within the design process operating a hierarchy of decisions that inform our products. We don’t just make products from an arbitrary perspective of ‘making a product to sell’, we think first of the huge biodiversity loss problem we face as human use of resources encroaches closer on the natural world; the problem stimulates the product need.
When we design a new product, we think of the species needs, calculate the energy used in the process, make sure that the product we make is answering the need in a way that uses the most minimal resource. By calculating the overall impact and footprint of choices through the design process, we know that our output is doing more good than harm. Impact reporting is a business process we undergo and our first formal impact report is due in 2022-23.
The circular economy
Using waste material that would have been binned for a purpose that helps to support life, where once it would have created loss we can use those materials and repurpose them to help mitigate the biodiversity loss we are facing.
Cycle to work!
Where possible our colleagues cycle to work and they are the majority. We offer a cycle to work scheme to encourage this (although our staff tend to be keen cyclists!) and most of our recruits tend to live locally. When we think about the quality of life for our people, we are keen to encourage a happy and content team. This enables us to cycle home for lunch if we need, to spend more time with children or have fun in the sea rather than commuting!
Preserving our local wild environment.
To have a global or national impact we can’t neglect what’s so beautiful right on our doorstep. From being members of the Bat Conservation Trust, Cornwall Wildlife Trust and by supporting the Nansmellyn nature reserve right next to us here in Perranporth to re-open, we are looking at ways we can help our local nature. On both a wildlife and a community level, we feel this helps to encourage our vision of connecting people with nature and bringing positive impact close to home, leading by example of what we hope to achieve.
These actions to be champions for nature are just the start, and by no means the limit of what we do on a day-to-day basis in doing our work. By making onward incremental changes we are on a journey of continuous improvement, taking our communities with us on our mission to Make Homes Havens for Wildlife.
How are you responding to the urgent need for conservation?