Blog
Winston Supports Earth Day “End Plastic Pollution” Campaign
Blog
April 23, 2018
Our Corporate Social Responsibility program—Winston for Good—selected End Plastic Pollution, the global theme for Earth Day 2018, as the focus for the firm’s Earth Week activities this year. Our goal for the week was to raise awareness of and make an intentional impact on the exponential growth of plastics and their threat to our planet.
Plastics are useful and make our lives easier in many ways, but they are also some of the most commonly littered items in the world. Plastic drinking straws—which Americans throw away at a rate of 500 million per day—are particularly harmful to our waterways and marine life.
Throughout Earth Week, April 16-20, Winston removed plastic drinking straws from all offices that offer them and presented a Lunch and Learn program featuring Straws, A Film by Linda Booker. A number of the restaurant tenants and management companies in our office buildings further supported our straw-reduction efforts.
We invited all firm members to be part of the solution by participating in a 5-Day Challenge to make one or more of these changes to their lunchtime routine:
- Bring food from home in a washable, reusable container.
- If you buy your lunch, pass on the plastic takeout bag or bring your own reusable bag.
- Bring in a set of metal or bamboo utensils that you can wash and reuse each day.
- Instead of single-use cups or plastic water bottles, use the tumblers and mugs provided by the firm or carry your own refillable water bottle/mug.
- Refuse to use plastic drinking straws.
At the end of the week, participants were entered into a raffle for environmentally friendly prizes. We also distributed daily communications with tips and tools to help firm members Reduce, Reuse, Refuse, Recycle, and Remove plastic pollution during Earth Week 2018 and beyond.
Our Earth Week awareness campaign has already resulted in significant progress toward additional sustainability efforts at the firm. Many of our offices have permanently removed plastic straws (or replaced them with paper), installed additional water bottle filling stations to reduce the use of plastic-bottled water, and implemented coffee pod recycling and other waste-reducing initiatives. Firm members in the UK, where plastic straws were recently banned country-wide, reminded their colleagues that their plastic milk cartons belong in the recycling bin, not the regular trash.
Visit our Corporate Social Responsibility page to learn more about Winston for Good.
This entry has been created for information and planning purposes. It is not intended to be, nor should it be substituted for, legal advice, which turns on specific facts.