🥇 Badge of the Month: Sustainability/April

Miša Hennin

Hey,

Welcome to April's Badge of the Month! As part of our Rewards Program, Badge of the Month gives you an easy way to join in and connect with others, and earn a new badge. Your answers don't have to be Meister-related, we'd just like to hear from you 😃.

Want to know the rules? Check out this post.

Already know the rules? Read on to find out what this month is all about!

Badge of the Month: April 2023

This month, people from all over the world will celebrate Earth Day - a day devoted to the appreciation of our beautiful but fragile planet 🌍 and the consideration of how we can treat it better both individually and collectively 🫶.

We want to take this opportunity to share tips and tricks on how we can all behave more sustainably in the workplace and at home. How do you do your part for the planet? It could be as simple as switching off your monitor and charger at the socket overnight or choosing an ethical internet provider. Please share your ideas in the comments below ❤️.

Best,

Miša

P.S. Thanks to @JanaIngendahl for emphasizing the importance of sustainability in this post!

Richard Vitaris

I am trying to be paperless. I avoid printing documents, instead making digital copies. I get digital rather than physical subscriptions to magazines and newspapers, and read books on my Kindle rather than buying hard copies. While these things may be everyday routine for younger people and not even seem worth mentioning, it is a major change for us old timers.

Admin BSF.company

Hi 👋

I have the practice of always locking my computer before leaving my desk, and the default energy settings were configured to turn off the screens after 10 minutes of inactivity.

I've come to the conclusion that nobody needs to see my beautiful wallpapers for so long…

The new settings will turn off the screens after just 1 min on the 3 power modes available.

I hope your day gets off to a good start!

Regards.

Andres

CL Webb

Like @Richard Vitaris, I have gone paperless and mostly digital too. (Just received my Kindle last week!)

And, like @Andres D'Andrea, I have reduced my energy consumption where possible.

Also, on my daily walks, I always stop by my neighborhood grocery store and pickup a few items for the walk back home. I've only had to drive to the store twice in the past 10 months.

Joerg Koper

Thanks to our photovoltaic system, we have a largely autonomous supply of green electricity, which is very beneficial for us, as we mainly work from our home office. Our office has also been 99% digitalized and paperless for several years. So the printer only runs very rarely.

And we have switched 90% of our consulting services to web meetings. When personal appointments are scheduled in the local area, we use public transport whenever possible.

In our leisure time, we are mostly on outdoor tours in the nature…of course, without leaving any rubbish behind 😉

Best, Jörg

Jana Ingendahl

Thank you @Miša Hennin! Love the idea 😊

I personally really enjoy the app 2zero where you can try to challenge yourself every day/week/month and get a feeling for how much CO2 you are producing in your everyday life. We also used this app to make a team climate challenge throughout the European Sustainability Week last autumn where our employees could collect points that determined the scope of our christmas party. And we had a big party in the end 😅

Grocery shopping is almost impossible without any plastics but using for example reusable cotton coffee filters and the (of course fair trade & organic😁) grained coffee afterwards as fertilizer for the office plants is some good example how we can start thinking in circular behaviour without any bigger loss in convenience.

We also have only re-used hardware that was professionally refurbished and implemented a company policy to regulate business travels to a minimum and incentivise public transport.

To gain insight into our personal impacts regarding energy, we did some assessment on how much energy is consumed by hardware in the office and at home. For this we had an instrument for measuring which was passed on around the team members and everybody could share their data and discuss potential enhancements. This also became some kind of challenge over the weeks :)

Another experience I would love to share from my personal life: going on holiday by train through Europe! I spent three weeks in Sweden last autumn travelling only by train and I have never felt more relaxed when arriving at my holiday destination! During the 12h train ride from Hamburg to Stockholm I had the chance to calm down and settle my thoughts while getting to know a lot of amazing swedish people. And the sleeping options in the swedish trains are also very comfortable!

Rooster McNugget

Hi together

I am also working 95% paperless. Unfortunately, plans or contracts still have to be printed out in larger formats from time to time.

We also always turn off our devices when we leave the office for more than 2 hours. In the offices we have switched to free-standing lamps instead of overhead lighting at the workplaces. The free-standing lamps have a motion sensor and only light up when someone is at their workstation.
At the same time, we have replaced all old incandescent bulbs and FL lights with LED lights in 95% of our properties (in my home 100%) and reduced the duration of lighting in the general rooms.

For all coffee lovers who want to avoid plastic or aluminum capsules, take a look at coffeeB.

Best,
Samuel

Beata Mertyn

• switching off your monitor and charger at the socket overnight
• turning off the water during washing teeth
• using reusable bag at the shopping
• turning of the light after leaving a room
• re-using plastic bag if I had any
• buying tickets online; not printing them

CL Webb

https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/4098#Comment_4098

@Merbe - That's a great list. 🙂

Marlene Lechner

Hi everyone :)

I already love all the recommendations in this post, so inspiring for everyday life!
@JanaIngendahl thank you for sharing your experiences with 2zero, I had heard of the app before and your experiences with it sound super cool! The gamification component with collecting points for the christmas party could definitely work at Meister aswell and I will look into it 😄

On a more personal note: one of my goals for this year is to educate myself about sustainable investing and impact investing with the help of podcasts, reading and also starting conversations with people who already have experience in the field. Still at the beginning of this journey, but excited to see where it leads me!

Best,
Marlene

Marlene Lechner

Hi, me again! 😄

Prompted by this thread I had a conversation with our lovely office manager today in an effort to find out which of the things mentioned here we could also implement in our office. She loved your idea Jana of using the coffee as fertilizer for office plants - we will start doing that.

She let me know about a few other cool things that we are doing right now, which I would like to share here too for inspiration:

• for all of the drinks we have in the office, we recently switched to returnable glass bottles
• in our office garden, we have made an effort to plant as many bee and butterfly friendly plants as we can and you can actually already see some bees coming to them 🐝
• we are mostly paperless and only rarely use printers in the office
• we make a conscious effort to purchase as much of our hardware as possible refurbished
• all of our colleagues based in Vienna are provided with a yearly public transport ticket

Hope you are all having a great start to the new week! 🙌

Andrew Lapidus

Thanks everyone for such an incredible thread!

https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/4052#Comment_4052

I wanted to jump in here and also share my experience with European railways! I recently took a Spring Break trip to Italy using the overnight train and was very happy with the experience!

As @Liis Monson mentioned in her recent AMA, responsible travel is a tremendous challenge, but seen from another perspective, it's also a simple way to have a tremendous pound-for-pound impact on carbon emissions. I'm certainly no expert, but a quick google search shows that the difference in CO2 between a Train trip vs. flight from Vienna → Rome is… well, staggering.

https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/3998#Comment_3998

Also wanted to highlight this point about paperless offices! My first office job involved a large amount of administrative prep for weekly medical seminars. Thinking back, it's absolutely astonishing to remember the sheer amount of paper we went through each week. Each week meant preparing textbook-sized materials for an audience of 100+ doctors. Our office literally included a full-sized storage room filled from floor to ceiling with printing paper delivered in trucks every week. Sometimes feels like another world! :D

Emily

Really love the comments here (and the theme this month!)

One of the biggest changes I've been trying to implement is changing what I buy. With such a broken recycling system, I don't believe we can rely on 'recycling' to save the world now. I do think we have at least some power as consumers and have been trying to be more and more selective with what I buy and from where.

This is especially the case when it comes to fruit and vegetables. Although I might crave raspberries (for example), I hold off on buying them until they're in season.

In terms of the workspace, I can definitely relate to Richard and Andrew's points on moving away from paper. When I first started teaching, I was printing so many resources all the time. This has definitely changed - especially with new learning aids like MindMeister!

I love some of the ideas above and the coffee for fertilizer is such an easy one to implement.

Miša Hennin

Happy Monday!

As we're approaching the end of the month, I thought it might be time for me to add my ideas here.

Firstly, I'd like to thank you all for contributing - This has been a really enlightening post for me! I am pleased to see inspiration both for the office and home. It was great to get input from our office manager via Marlene too 😁.

Like Emily, I'm careful with where I buy things. I especially try to boycott big companies like Amazon. The convenience of next-day (or even same-day) delivery can be very hard to resist but I find that if I don't look at the options on Amazon at all, I mostly avoid temptation. I also try to buy most clothes second-hand. Depop is a great app in England where I both buy and sell clothes. In Austria, Willhaben is a similar app which I've heard works really well. You can find furniture, TVs, clothes, shoes and much more on there for very cheap.

I work from home so my office tips are less distinct. I always turn off appliances at the wall socket when I finish work to avoid leaving them on standby. And I wear extra socks/ jumpers/ blankets before using the heating!

Best,

Miša