The Art of Selling Environment, Health and Safety
Kelvin Roth
We are told that our education, particularly our technical skills, will prepare us to succeed in a career in environment, health and safety (EHS) management. So back when I was working on my degree in Environmental Engineering, I was taught how to design, build and run projects. I developed technical skills as well as project management skills. And while these elements are certainly important to every EHS manager, one critical component tends to be left out of our schooling: the art of selling and marketing.
We know that EHS programs don’t succeed without senior management support. The consequences of not having this support — insufficient budgets, lack of assistance from other functional areas, conflicting priorities and unnecessary obstacles — can be devastating. But to gain this support, you must know how to sell your program.
I’m not talking about the ability to make cold calls or engage in business development activities, of course — I’m talking about selling a project, idea or program.
Marketing means engaging the company in a targeted fashion. What has sold your program or idea to senior management will often not be the same set of benefits that convince your facility managers or operators. Your strategy needs to address all impacted “customers.”
Because selling and marketing are such critical components, it is important that you take the time during your program design process to plan how you will sell and market it. Put together an internal marketing plan that addresses the implementation strategy and the tactics you will use to promote that strategy. A good marketing plan is like a game plan: It serves as a guide for the actions you need to take, but also provides some flexibility to shift tactics to address any issues that may arise.
Here are a few tips for selling and marketing your EHS program that you should consider when developing your internal marketing plan. (And don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from your marketing people!)
- Understand your company: You need to know your company’s goals and how it makes money. Simply knowing its EHS issues is insufficient; you need to understand your company’s position in the market.
- Lead with your strength: Define the biggest or broadest benefit of your program and lead with that. Keep the message simple and consistent.
- Develop the program “brand”: All successful programs have a common language, look and feel, regardless of where they are implemented in the company. Develop talking points that provide a quick and easy summary of the program to keep everyone focused on the key goals.
- Identify your best customers: If you can identify and engage those who will gain the most from the new program, they can help you sell it. Listen to the “voice of the customer” (or voice of the employee) and use their words to engage them and get them excited about the new program.
- Know your competition: There will be other programs that will compete for time and money. You need to have a plan to address these challenges and convince detractors that they can also gain from your program.
What other strategies have you used to effectively introduce new EHS programs in your company?
Kelvin Roth is President of the NAEM Board of Directors and the Director of Environment, Health & Safety for AMCOL International Corp.
Employee Engagement Advice from ThyssenKrupp’s “Green Girl”
Sasha Bailey
Over the course of the last few years, I have acquired quite a few pseudonyms: the Green Girl, the Recycling Lady, Green Team Leader, Head of the Glee Club, the-hateful-woman-who-took-my-desktop-printer …you get the point. (By far my favorite is ‘head of the Glee Club’) But at the end of the day, when all the number crunching and reporting and return on investment talk is over, if your employees do not get on the bandwagon, all the corporate mandates in the world will not help you meet your sustainability targets.
As the official head of the Glee Club, I have come to recognize several truths regarding employee engagement:
- One: You have to meet people where they are. Basically it does no good to talk to an office manager like an engineer and an engineer like an office manager. Their priorities are different; thus, they hear messages differently.
- Two: Everyone likes contests. Everyone. No matter how much you are may think, “People at my company would never get involved”, I’m here to tell you they would. Amazingly, people (and by people, I mean full-grown adults) love pizza parties. (You – shaking your head – trust me. They do.)
- Three: People want to hear positive things and think happy thoughts. Skip the polar bears and water shortages. I don’t mean to sound callous, but you are going to help the bears much more by getting people involved in up-cycling candy wrappers as part of their office sustainability initiatives than not doing anything at all.
- Four: Lip service looks exactly like lip service. It is amazing how keen people are on detecting nonsense. If your managers and executives are not committed to employee engagement, why would the employees commit to it? A CEO in a T-shirt and jeans planting trees will take you further than 1,000 witty emails or polar bear pictures.
- Five: Put the “glee” in glee club. Don’t put someone in charge of your employee engagement initiatives unless they have personality! Information has to be engaging enough for someone to click the link or open the email.
To some, the above may sound like I am advocating silly contests with butterflies and wood nymphs, while ignoring the real issues. The fact is, I am capable of talking life cycle analysis and carbon footprints with the best of them. But in the last five years, I have learned that to get people to participate, you first have to get them interested. And to get their interest, you have to be someone they want to hear. You have to have a voice that does not judge or preach or tell them what to do, but rather a voice they start to trust* and actually enjoy hearing from.
*Little disclaimer: On average, I receive 7-10 emails a month from random employees tattling on coworkers for wasting paper, making green suggestions or just asking me advice on which brand of laundry detergent to use or where to take used batteries. The upside is that I also get dried mushrooms from an employee in Maine, photos of people’s gardens and every chain email out there about grandmothers remembering ‘before it was green’. I LIKE being trusted!
Sasha Bailey is the Strategic Communications Manager for ThyssenKrupp Elevator-Americans Operating Unit, where she is responsible for creating and implementing high level communications strategies for all business units within the Americas as well as acting as the press and media liaison.
The Most Important Weapon in the Sustainability Toolbox
Bruce Klafter
Pop Quiz: What is the most important skill sustainability professionals need to do their job?
An understanding of lifecycle analysis? The ability to calculate a greenhouse gas inventory? A command of climate science? Experience with kaizen, poke yoke and genchi genbetsu (all Japanese supply chain management concepts)?
In my humble opinion, the most important and oft-used tool is an optimistic outlook. The reason for this somewhat surprising conclusion is that sustainability managers are typically working to exert influence across an organization, which may mean working without authority or as I like to say “working without a net”.
In the job descriptions I’ve written for the sustainability family at my company, this trait is referred as “a positive attitude and passion for sustainability.” A number of organizations that have taken a more exhaustive and scholarly approach to identifying job skills have also singled out “passion”, “enthusiasm” and a “positive attitude” as a key skills or attributes for people working in this emerging field. For more information, you may refer to studies from the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and the Corporate Responsibility Officers Association.
When confronted with our colleagues’ protests that they lack the time, the resources, the bandwidth, or simply the interest to support a sustainability initiative, what is the best response?
My thesis is that a negative response (e.g. expressing disappointment, anger, exasperation) is never the right response. After all, if the sustainability team cannot maintain a belief that the initiative will happen eventually, then it is hard to expect your colleagues to form that belief. My experience has been that persistence and patience usually pay dividends at some point. Some of the projects I am currently working on took nearly three years to take hold, with a change in management and current events helping drive a greater sense of urgency. To my counterparts in NAEM and elsewhere – keep a smile and keep on plugging away!
Bruce Klafter is head of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability at Applied Materials, Inc. and leads the effort to fulfill the Company’s commitment to sustainability in the design and implementation of business strategies and worldwide operations. He serves as the champion for Applied Materials’ green programs and manages a variety of reporting, employee engagement and other strategic projects aimed at enhancing the company’s global citizenship programs. Mr. Klafter additionally directed the Company’s Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) programs for several years and began his career at Applied Materials as its first EHS legal counsel.
Aligning Sustainability Goals, Vocabulary
Sandy Nessing
When it comes to sustainability, defining it depends on who you talk to. That was eminently clear recently when the Electric Utility Industry Sustainable Supply Chain Alliance (“Alliance”) held a stakeholder roundtable with about 30 suppliers to the industry. The objectives were to identify and share best practices, hear about challenges and to network.
Not surprising, there were two familiar themes that came from the discussions. The first was that suppliers and utilities are in agreement that sustainability is a bottom line business issue. Suppliers and utilities said that if making changes to business practices improves their return on investment, they wouldn’t hesitate to do it. The second theme was the need for more consistency around the definition of sustainability. There was unanimous agreement that the overall inconsistency in defining sustainability within a company or an industry makes it challenging to understand the vision or to justify investments without certain payback. (On the flip side, some suppliers said they never would have undertaken changes to reduce water use or improve energy efficiency, for example, if the Alliance hadn’t asked about it.)
The suppliers have a good point about the need for clarity. I’ve heard these same types of complaints with regard to safety performance expectations for contractors. Every utility has different safety standards and requirements for contractors and the lack of a single set of industry expectations is confusing, putting contractors and company employees at risk of harm.
Without clear direction and a business case, how can we set expectations? I believe the Alliance is on the right track with its vision for a sustainable supply chain and much progress has already been made. But based on the feedback from suppliers, there’s still a lot of work yet to be done. Not the least of which is to more clearly define what a sustainable supply chain looks like for the electric utility industry.
What are you doing to offer clarity around ‘sustainability’ for your customers and suppliers? What definition of sustainability do you use?
Sandy Nessing is the Director of Sustainability & ESH Strategy & Design for American Electric Power Co. Inc.. She wrote and published AEP’s first Corporate Sustainability Report in 2007 and in 2010 published AEP’s first integrated Corporate Accountability Report, a combination of the annual sustainability report and Annual Report to Shareholders. Follow her on Twitter at @Watts4U.
Product Stewardship: It’s Not a One-Size-Fits-All Challenge
Chris Nelson
With product sustainability and stewardship issues becoming more important and complex in the marketplace it’s still unclear to many organizations what is the best approach in finding ways to create business value and manage risk associated with product sustainability and stewardship.
More than 100 EHS and sustainability leaders attended NAEM’s Product Stewardship Conference last week in Framingham,Mass. to discuss product sustainability and stewardship issues. It’s rare when you get that many people together to discuss these topics so there was a lot of great information and insights shared between the attendees.
The topics varied and included the challenging global product regulatory landscape, leveraging life cycle management to create business value within an organization, managing supply chain transparency and reporting issues, and the different ways to design and implement product sustainability programs.
The thing that really caught my attention was how greatly companies differ in their approaches to creating value and managing risk from a transparency and performance improvement perspective, both key pillars to any product sustainability and stewardship program. The following are a few examples of the strategies companies are taking.
Intel shared the approach they were taking to address the pending conflict minerals reporting requirements in section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Conflict minerals such as tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold are an increasingly challenging issue within the supply chain, from the mining and extractive industry to downstream manufacturing companies in the electronics industry. Intel’s serious approach to providing transparency about the sourcing of conflict minerals, was quite admirable and isn’t something you see every day. The company believes transparency is “foundational to fostering understanding and acceptance in order to move suppliers along the sustainability maturity curve.” Since transparency is a critical part to any sustainability program so I’d suggest taking a look at a video Intel has created which explains how they are establishing a conflict free supply chain.
It was also very interesting to hear how APC Schneider Electric and WESCO International Inc. are using product sustainability programs to address customer requirements and create differentiation in the marketplace. These represent very good examples of the challenges of balancing transparency and environmental performance as part of a product sustainability program.
APC Schneider Electric has developed a ‘green premium’ program that focuses on the transparency and reporting of the environmental performance on a selected group of its products. These products must meet international standards and regulations such as RoHS, REACH and End of Life in addition to having a published and third-party-verified life cycle assessment. Because there isn’t an environmental performance threshold to the program per se (other than meeting international standards and regulations) their definition of ‘green premium’ revolves around transparency and less on improved environmental performance of the product. It will be interesting to see how their program evolves over time as they’ll likely need to answer more questions about the environmental performance of their products as this information is made available to customers and stakeholders.
Wesco has a fabric-based solution for laying cable in duct work called MaxCell. Across its life cycle, this product has superior performance related to carbon emissions, but the company struggled to communicate an effective ‘sustainability story’ to their customers. Ultimately Wesco chose to work with Carbon Trust, a third-party certification body, to verify their product carbon footprint. Although the company chose not to use the Carbon Trust certification logo, it still went through the verification process to confirm its environmental performance claims and as a demonstration to customers that the product would continue to reduce carbon emissions over time.
It’s clear that companies are challenged in finding ways to create business value and manage risk with product sustainability and stewardship. The level of transparency a company chooses to provide depends on the overall strategy, and each decision brings its own benefits and risks.
What are the elements that shape your product stewardship strategy? How is your company adapting to the demands of product stewardship?
Chris Nelson is a Partner with ERM, a leading global provider of environmental, health, safety, risk, and sustainability consulting services. He leads ERM’s Global Product Sustainability Services Practice which is focused on helping ERM’s clients design and implement product sustainability and stewardship programs that create business value from preferential environmental and social outcomes.
Between Silos, Beyond Walls: The Product Stewardship Puzzle
Carol Singer Neuvelt
Last week I traveled to Boston for NAEM’s Product Stewardship conference, where we discussed best practices for complying with new product-focused regulations, internal collaboration, managing supply chain data, and engaging customers and suppliers.
Like many sustainability initiatives, “product stewardship” is an exciting concept, with the potential to spur innovation and transform the structures on which our current industrial ecosystem is built. Whether your company defines product stewardship broadly as “green product development” or in terms of compliance with product regulations, it involves re-thinking the fundamentals of how the product was designed, produced and labeled.
This is easier said than done.
From the outside, finding out what goes into your products might seem pretty straightforward: First, you ask your product development or research and development folks to tell you what materials go into your products. Then, you find out where those materials came from and document that information. Simply talking to your first-tier suppliers, however, will not likely yield the full answers you seek. For diversified manufacturers with global supply chains, product stewardship is an exercise akin pulling a loose thread on a sweater and seeing how long it takes to stop unraveling. Where does it end? And how far back “beyond the gates” is your company accountable?
In the overall history of manufacturing, the era of transparency is in its infancy. Our globalized manufacturing platforms operate on systems which were designed to be predictable, reliable and cost-effective. Introducing a new variable may be the next step in the evolution of proactive environmental management, but meeting the challenge of this paradigm shift will take time to accomplish. Companies are not yet accustomed to disclosing the information their customers and the regulations are now requiring; companies might not have data management systems adequate to meet the challenge; suppliers might not have the data their customers are seeking; that data may require third-party validation before it can confidently relied on; and, the transparency of that data may be associated with unintended business risks.
In other words, it’s a process. A process that has yet to be mastered.
Our recent benchmarking survey on the topic revealed that among the leadership companies who belong to NAEM, there is not a consistent approach to defining, managing or leading product stewardship efforts. Given the systemic nature of this challenge, many companies have responded by creating a cross-functional team composed of representatives from environment health and safety (EHS), procurement, legal, research and development, operations and marketing. The outstanding management question companies are struggling with, however, is who should be ultimately responsible for the outcome of the collaboration?
It’s likely that each industry, each company and each business team will answer that question for itself. But the issue of accountability is yet another thread on the sweater, a reminder that like many sustainability initiatives, the product stewardship challenge involves as many questions as answers.
Extended Producer Responsibility: Recycling for the 21st Century
Dania Nasser
In April, Dania Nasser, a graduate student at Yale University and a member of NAEM’s Emerging Leaders group, sat down to speak with Michael Washburn, Director of Sustainability at Nestlé Waters North America, about why the company is supporting an innovative approach to recycling called extended producer responsibility (EPR).
DN: Michael, what exactly is EPR?
MW: Common in Europe and Canada, EPR requires industries, such as the beverage industry, to pay for the collection and recycling of their products once they reach the end of life. We hope to bring the financial responsibility of recycling back to the industry, while collaborating with municipalities to increase access to curbside recycling and recycling away from home.
In 2010, Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) supported the launch of an EPR program in the Canadian province of Manitoba, featuring four key elements: curbside recycling, public spaces recycling, commercial/institutional recycling and a public education plan. Results thus far have been encouraging, and will provide key learnings for EPR in the U.S.
DN: Why does NWNA support EPR?
MW: At Nestlé Waters, we seek to capture and reuse every Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) beverage container, so we put ourselves on the front lines of advancing recycling, whether it is in the lab, the field or at the policy level. While PET containers for bottled water make up less than 1 percent of all U.S. municipal solid waste, much work remains to ensure these, and all valuable recyclable materials, stay out of landfills.
It’s really in our best business interest as well: EPR serves as a risk-reduction strategy around our materials. Volatile commodity prices are an issue for us, and the ability recoup materials can help stabilize our costs.
To evaluate how to get our bottles back for creation of recycled PED (rPET) bottles, we examined a variety of recycling programs and found we’d need a multi-pronged approach that includes institutional and commercial recycling, as well as curbside and away-from-home. We see EPR as the only way you can do it, by folding fees into a broad variety of packaging, isolating them – importantly, outside of government – and then using funds derived from those fees to meet recycling goals that are set by state government.
Speaking of recycling goals, we hope that EPR will help to double U.S. recycling rates for all PET plastic bottles to 60 percent by 2018, a Corporate Citizenship goal we set in 2008.
DN: Some states have redemption incentives for in place for people. Did you examine this approach as well?
MW: We don’t want to dismantle bottle bills, but we do want to out-perform them, and so we are focusing our current efforts on non-bottle bill states. But there are other challenges to consider. Among other issues, bottle bills reinforce the notion that plastic bottles and beverage containers are the problem, when, in fact, these are only part of a broader societal problem in which too much valuable packaging material is going to landfills.
We want to have a deliberate, fact-rich dialogue on what EPR is and how it works, so we are working to launch EPR in states that don’t have a bottle bill, but have good recycling infrastructure and support in place, like Minnesota and Maryland. This will mean we can collaborate around EPR as a new model, without having to delve too far into the relative wisdom or merits of bottle bills.
In addition, we want to engage the kinds of stakeholders who traditionally support bottle deposits so they can come with us on this journey and understand that we can get higher rates of recovery with a different tool, and – from an environmental and efficiency standpoint – can ultimately out-perform bottle bills.
DN: What kinds of industry players and other stakeholders are you working with in support of EPR?
MW: We’re working with a really broad range of stakeholder groups, including consumer product companies, beverage companies, various trade associations, commodity groups, private haulers, municipalities, state legislatures, environmental NGOs, grocery retailers, other retailers, the forest product industry and more.
I’ll share one example of a stakeholder group. Recycling Reinvented is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to advancing recycling rates of waste packaging and printed material in the U.S. through an EPR model that would require brand owners to develop and fund effective recycling programs. We are directly supporting Recycling Reinvented’s efforts, both through funding and our CEO Kim Jeffery’s leadership as a member of the organization’s board.
In addition, many people are aware of a dialogue process facilitated by a group called Future 500 that has brought together 30 organizations to talk about the best attributes of an EPR program that could work in states in the U.S and how to craft a legislative package and a strategy to successfully pass that package. We’re going to try and move legislation in 2013.
DN: Obviously, you’re hoping for the legislation to be successful. What’s its best selling point from a societal and government perspective?
MW: This is really the most rational approach to what is a challenging dynamic around the disposal of valuable materials in this country. Taxpayers should be uncomfortable with contributing to a system that brings only a 30 percent recycling rate for plastic bottles. So this is deeper than our own interests in the issue. We’re going to see a louder drumbeat growing over time from the standpoint of commodity associations that want this material back, municipal governments who are fiscally burdened by the current system and stakeholder groups that think that companies should shoulder this responsibility. I think that’s where our broader culture is headed—more and more, companies are expected to take responsibility for their products, from the sourcing of ingredients to disposal of packaging.
Dania Nasser is completing a Masters in Environmental Management at Yale University. She is Director of Environmental Affairs at a New York law firm specializing in environmental and construction law and a member of the Board of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce Green Finance Committee. Ms. Nasser has an undergraduate degree in environmental engineering and a law degree.
Transforming Sustainability Principles into Sustainable Products
Parynaz Mehta
For healthcare products and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, an environment, health and safety review is embedded within the new product development process. This week we spoke with Parynaz Mehta, Senior Manager of Product Stewardship for the company’s Medical Devices & Diagnostics division to understand how product stewardship transforms sustainability principles into sustainable products.
GT: How do you define product stewardship at Johnson and Johnson?
PM: For us, product stewardship is making sure that we offer environmentally compliant and sustainable products to our customers, and we do that by looking at the entire life cycle of our products. So right from designing the product to be compliant, to picking the right type of materials to picking the right type of packaging to making sure that we try to offer our customers solutions for end-of-life type of issues, and making sure that we try to offer end-of-life options to our customers.
Product stewardship is just one pillar of the overall sustainability strategy, which also includes working with our suppliers and external manufacturers to expand the definition of sustainability beyond our fence. So we work in partnership with our suppliers and external manufacturers, and we also engage our internal customers in conversations around sustainability. So how do we get our own employees excited? And what can they do at the local level within our facilities for sustainability? We also engage with telling our sustainability stories externally. We engage with customers, we engage with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other interested groups to talk about sustainability outside.
GT: What is the relationship between product compliance and product stewardship?
PM: Compliance is the first step of the product stewardship process. It’s like the foundation, the bed rock. The number one objective of our product stewardship team within medical devices and diagnostic team is to make sure that everything we design and everything that we put on the market is fully compliant.
GT: You said Product Stewardship is a team effort. Who is responsible for Product Stewardship at Johnson and Johnson?
PM: At the enterprise level, sustainability is owned by worldwide environment, health and safety (EHS). That’s the corporate department that drives sustainability and product stewardship. At the sector level, I lead the product stewardship for the Medical Devices and Diagnostics sector and I report in through the Senior Director for EHS.
GT: How have initiatives like product stewardship changed the relationship between EHS and product design?
PM: We work very closely with research and development (R&D) teams. Actually, at Johnson & Johnson, the EHS assessment, the ‘design for environment’ assessment has always been embedded in the R&D process. There’s a whole process map that R&D follows where it has certain stage gates, and for the past ten years or more, there has been a well-established stage gate for a design for environment review. (That name is a little bit misleading because it’s actually a product stewardship/EHS review.) We have now re-branded the ‘design for environment’ term internally and are calling that our ‘earth words’ process. So when we do new product development, we have a stage gate when we engage with our R&D teams to have the conversations around “What’s in your product? What are the materials that we’re going to be using? What are the manufacturing processes? Where is this going to be manufactured? What’s the packaging going to look like? How is it going to be disposed of?” Wherever we can, we try to engage with those teams to drive the sustainability conversation.
Parynaz Mehta is Senior Manager of Product Stewardship for Johnson & Johnson’s Medical Devices & Diagnostics Supply Chain. She will be presenting on the impact of new product focused regulations at NAEM’s 2012 Product Stewardship Conference in Boston on May 9-10.
Engaging Employees Means Sparking Passion
Alex Pollock
One of the greatest leadership challenges we face continues to be the unlocking of human potential in our workplaces. For the last decade I’ve read Gallup and Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) workplace surveys, which uncover data like “only 38 percent of employees believe senior management is sincerely interested in employee well-being” ; “only one in five employees is truly engaged, heart and soul, in their work”; and “nearly 38 percent of employees are mostly and entirely disengaged at work”.
What would an organization look like where passion abounds?
In his latest book, “What matters now” Gary Hamel suggests we can learn from some things from Web culture, which is a “testament to the power of intrinsic rewards”. The Web compounds our passions, he believes, because online…
- No one can kill a good idea
- Everyone can pitch in
- Anyone can lead
- No one can dictate
- You get to choose your cause
- You can easily build upon what others have done
- You don’t have to put up with bullies and tyrants
- Agitators don’t get marginalized
- Excellence usually wins
- Passion killing policies get reversed
- Great contributions get recognized and celebrated
“Organizations will never be fully capable until they are fully human”, proclaims Hamel.
What are ways that we can magnify rather than shrink human passion in the workplace? What are those attributes that you feel are essential to keep us “engaged” at work? What are our responsibilities and the responsibilities of those in leadership roles to embed these traits in workplace culture?
If we want to change the workplace survey results we must all be the change we wish to see.
Happy Earth Day 2012
Rock Creek Park cleanup 2012
This past weekend I started my Earth Day celebrations with a Cub Scout-sponsored cleanup of one of the DC area’s greatest natural treasures – Rock Creek Park. And according to my fifth-grade son, he and I have been participating in annual park clean-ups since he entered elementary school.
What is special in this seemingly ordinary experience is that to him, Earth Day is a normal, annual ritual. While he was running to join the others rock-hopping across the narrow bend in the creek, I overheard him say, “My mom works to take care of the environment all year round. Earth Day is a big deal around our house and we’ve got a lot of activities planned.” Those words were uttered with both nonchalance and pride. What a difference a generation makes.
Earth Day is every day at NAEM. Each of us believes that in fulfilling the association’s mission of empowering corporate EHS managers with knowledge and practical insight, we are making a difference in helping the planet. The staff at NAEM is joined together by a shared values orientation, and we are proud to support a community of professionals who work hard to meet the ethical obligations for compliance, reduce their company’s environmental footprint and help to make workplaces safer and healthier for their fellow employees.
But even though we have chosen to work at place that reflects our personal beliefs, the weeks around April 22 are especially fun for our staff. Last year we created some wonderful videos from our Green TIPS Guide. This year we’d like to share with you some of the ways our personal practices reflect the work we do at our jobs. Whether it’s our passion for the outdoors, rehabbing an older home or riding a bike to work, I hope you will enjoy the NAEM facebook page and we welcome your pictures and stories of Earth Day celebrations.
As I was walking back from my morning of playing in the river beds, walking on logs across the creek and following my son holding a full bag of garbage, this thought came to my mind:
We pay attention to what we value…. We value what has meaning to us... That meaning comes from our heart, our community, and our experiences.
I hope that you will get to celebrate Earth Day in your way, and I encourage you to commit yourself to taking action every day.
