Winston Supports Earth Day Protect Our Species Campaign

Our Corporate Social Responsibility program—Winston for Good—selected Protect Our Species, the global theme for Earth Day 2019, as the focus for the firm’s Earth Week activities this year. This theme recognizes the intrinsic value and unique role of all living things in the complex web of life.

Our goal for Earth Week was to raise awareness of and make an intentional impact on the extinction of species due to habitat loss, climate change, and other factors. We invited all firm members to be part of the solution by participating in a 5-Day ‘Sustainable Consumption Challenge’ to meet the following goals:

• Take a Biodiversity Quiz and learn the importance of ‘keystone’ species by viewing a short video.
• Reduce your carbon footprint by using electronic copies of most documents and take an Ecological Footprint quiz to learn how many earths would be needed to support your lifestyle.
• Make all of your meals meatless for one day.
• Refuse single-use plastics offered to you throughout the day (bags, straws, take-out containers).
• Attend a lunchtime viewing of the first installment of the Our Planet. 

Participants were entered into a raffle for environmentally friendly prizes, including stainless steel straws, reusable grocery bags, beeswax wraps (a sustainable alternative to plastic wrap), and 100% raw honey.

Winston for Good also provided firm members with daily communications about the importance of biodiversity in safeguarding human survival and resources for adopting sustainable consumption habits to help protect all species during Earth Week 2019 and beyond.

Recognizing the intrinsic value that keystone species such as bees play in the complex web of life, a number of our offices held Spelling Bee Socials to help create some buzz around this issue. We are also pleased to announce that Winston is working with building management in a number of our locations to install beehives on rooftops or other designated outdoor areas. We look forward to providing more details about this initiative in the coming months.

A number of our offices have continued to build on the firm’s 2018 Earth Day End Plastic Pollution campaign, which resulted in the elimination of plastic straws and bottled water in many of our locations. Most recently, our Houston office joined the “Grounds to Grow On” program, which recycles plastic coffee and tea pods and turns the grounds into compost.

Visit our Corporate Social Responsibility page to learn more about sustainability and other Winston for Good.