EF news
Thinking green and traveling sustainably
Katie Collins | April 22, 2019
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It’s Earth Day—and here at EF, we’re working hard to reduce our carbon footprint and encourage eco-friendly travel. Read on to see how our Boston office is celebrating Earth Day and how you can reduce your own carbon footprint while traveling!
EF Boston’s office formed a Green Team in December 2017. Their mission? Educate staff on environmental issues while offering alternatives—presenting problems and solutions. On earth day last year, they encouraged staff to use reusable mugs and water bottles and showcased a local company with compost demonstrations. Over the summer, they supported the Boston office in their break up with single-use plastic.
“Each year, an estimated eight million metric tons of plastic flows into the ocean. That’s an entire dump truck of plastic emptying into the ocean every single minute of every single day, 365 days a year—that’s not sustainable for people, the planet or our ocean.” – Our Plastic Problem
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Now, Earth Day is here again! This time the Green Team is making a week of it. Ever heard of the phrase ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’? Well at EF, we’re taking it two steps further. Instead of three R’s, we have five: one for each day of the work week!
Sarah Carey from the Green team shared that the five R’s framework is meant to help engage staff throughout Earth Week—and it’s been adopted in EF offices around the world. Since the official Green Team reveal in April last year, nineother EF offices have sprouted Green Teams of their own!
Throughout the week we’ll be educating our staff on how they can start traveling more sustainably. Try some of these tips for eco-friendly travel on your next tour:
The Green Team will be expanding its education efforts beyond travel as well.
On Thursday, EF is hosting their second clothing swap! The EPA estimates 85% of clothes end up in landfills and that textiles make up 5% of U.S. landfills. Rather than throwing your clothes away, try swapping with friends! Need other ideas about how to responsibly dispose of your old clothes? Click here.
And on Friday, we’re focusing on recycling. EF Boston recycles with Save that Stuff, a Boston-based recyclable materials & waste resource management company. Over the last year, our collaboration with Save that Stuff has saved:
1,026 adult trees
815 cubic yards of landfill space
362,348 kilowatts of electricity or 214 barrels of oil
And reduced our carbon footprint by 72.55 metric tons of Carbon equivalent, equal to removing 58 cars from the roads each year.
This Earth Day, think about your own impact on our world. Consider measuring your carbon footprint and adopting some of our tips for eco-friendly travel to your own daily routines!
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Katie Collins
Unsurprisingly, Katie is another EF-er who loves to travel! She appreciates that travel forces you to cut down to the essentials and let go of excess stuff. Wherever she goes she’s looking for fun hikes, restaurants with gushing reviews and local flavors, and the highest place she can get to (think: mountaintop, bell tower, Duomo, jungle gym). Katie spent summer vacations traveling around the US to different National Parks. In college, she was lucky enough to spend a semester in Madrid and returned to Spain later on to walk El Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James). She is part of EF Explore America’s Product Management team.
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