Raising Sustainability Awareness – One Employee at a Time
A reuseable bag was produced – one of many initiatives at the site to raise sustainability awareness among employees.
The sustainability campaign at our Alfa Aesar business at Ward Hill, Massachusetts, USA made a storming start in summer 2008, with 43 different initiatives actively pursued in the first 90 days.
Representatives of the site attended Johnson Matthey’s Group Sustainability Awareness seminar in June 2008 and put together an aggressive campaign to further sustainability awareness and initiatives at Ward Hill. Efforts began in July when a sustainability task force was formed, together with three teams who looked at reducing energy, use of paper and the impact of waste. The task force was concerned with employee and community engagement efforts.
Before the team began its work, everyone involved participated in a training session – a shorter version of the group awareness seminar which also included ideas that employees could deploy outside work. 20 employees were trained and 20 ideas for greater sustainability were collected. Later a total of 50 business related ideas were categorised and forwarded to the teams. A web based log was set up to track the progress of ideas being pursued.
September was designated ‘sustainability month’ and by then many efforts were underway. General employee training began and by the end of the month, a further 103 on-site employees had been trained (all bar one, in fact). Paper and plastic kitchenware was replaced with reusable items and a reusable ‘sustainable’ bag was designed with the intention of distributing it to Johnson Matthey’s sites around the world to raise awareness. Other educational material was also distributed to employees.
After the first 90 days, what had been achieved? Of the 43 initiatives, 20 had been fully completed or by their nature were longer term ongoing commitments in the local community. A Sustainability Bulletin updated employees on progress, invited employee input and offered tips for sustainability at home.
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