7 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day with Your Remote Team
Remote teams can honor the planet with these virtual earth day activities
Every year Fearless Foundry picks a word that we want to embody. This year we picked sustainability because our company cares deeply about operating in a way that doesn’t harm people or the planet—we’ve even applied to be a B-Corp!
Needless to say, we love Earth Day, and think it’s a fun opportunity to honor Mother Earth and all that she offers us. Many large corporations organize fun Earth Day activities with their employees, but this can be difficult for fully remote teams. The solution? Find ways to pay homage to the planet remotely! Here are 7 virtual Earth Day ideas for remote teams. You’ve already got one box checked for nixing daily commutes!
#1: Offset Your Carbon Emissions
Most companies have carbon emissions. Even if your team is 100 percent remote, they will still generate CO2 emissions from their laptops, desktops, phones, and the electricity needed to operate these devices. While it’s possible to have zero carbon emissions, what many companies mean when they say they have zero emissions or they’re carbon neutral is that they offset their emissions.
Carbon offsetting is the process of putting money toward environmental projects in an attempt to balance a carbon footprint and reduce greenhouse gases. This is typically done in one of several ways:
By producing clean energy that reduces the need to rely on fossil fuels (E.g. solar power)
By capturing and storing greenhouse gases (E.g. planting trees)
By capturing and destroying greenhouse gases (E.g. methane gas capture at landfills)
Offsetting your carbon footprint is easy to do—many companies offer free carbon calculators that tell you how much money you would need to spend to become carbon neutral based on your activities, such as driving or flying.
Larger companies and corporations can offset their emissions through platforms like Net0, which helps businesses measure their carbon footprints, provides stakeholders with actionable CO2 reduction plans, and generates investor-grade performance reports.
Smaller businesses may prefer Clear, which allows for offsetting based on internet usage, business flights, recycling, and more. Clear also has options for individuals to offset their homes, internet, car, and more.
There are so many companies that offer carbon offsetting—Google anything from “carbon offsets to reduce poverty” to “carbon offsetting for the ocean” and you’re likely to find results. This is one of the easiest ways to celebrate a virtual Earth Day.
#2: Clean Out Your Inbox
Did you know that your emails have a carbon footprint? That’s right! Emails are sent through the internet and stored in data centers, both of which are largely powered by fossil fuels.
An article by EuroNews.Green cites a statistic from Berners Lee's book, The Carbon Footprint of Everything: A normal email has a footprint equivalent to 0.3 g of CO2 emissions. This can rise to 50g with the addition of a large attachment. This figure includes everything from the power in data centers to the computers that send, filter and read the messages.
This might not seem like a lot, but think about the number of emails each person has in their inbox, folders, and spam folder, and then multiply that by the almost 4 billion email users across the globe. On top of that, it’s estimated that 333.2 billion emails are sent per day! We’re not mathematicians, but we are smart enough to know that 0.3 g of CO2 x 333.2 billion emails per day adds up.
Deleting old messages, unwanted messages, and spam emails frees up space on servers that store email data, and may help reduce the amount of CO2 produced by systems that keep us all online. Having an inbox cleaning hour during Earth Day can be a fun and easy way for your remote team to get organized and help the planet.
#3: Volunteer for the Planet
If you search “Earth Day event ideas” one of the activities that will inevitably pop up is to have your team spend the day volunteering outside planting trees or doing a similar activity. It’s difficult for fully remote teams to come together like this, especially if everyone is located in a different state.
An alternative is allowing employees to spend an hour or two of paid work time—or the whole day—doing something to positively impact the planet. This could be picking up trash, planting herbs in a windowsill, or volunteering at a local plant nursery.
#4: Use a Green Search Engine
Google isn’t the only search engine! It’s easy to forget that other search engines exist because they get clouded out by giants like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google made over $256 billion dollars in ads in 2021, but where did that money go?
Luckily, companies are catching on and creating their own search engines that give back. Ecosia, for example, is a certified B-Corp that uses the profits from search ads to plant trees. Their chrome extension is easy to use—one tree is planted for every 45 searches. They’ve planted over 145,600,000 trees and counting! Ekoru is another search engine that raises revenue to remove garbage from the sea. All of their servers are powered by hydro-electricity.
Switching to one of these search engines for Earth Day is about as easy as it gets. Everyone uses the internet, why not use it in an earth-friendly way?
#5: Encourage Waste Awareness
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the average person produces 4.9 pounds of garbage every day. The total generation of municipal solid waste in 2018 was 292.4 million tons. Most people don’t pay too much attention to how much waste they generate, and many don’t know that a large portion of their waste can be recycled or composted.
A creative way to celebrate Earth Day is to raise awareness about waste. Are items that can be recycled getting thrown away? What about food waste like coffee grounds and banana peels that can be composted? Highlighting your company’s waste awareness efforts on social media can be a great way to show that your business and employees care about environmental issues.
#6: Bring In An Expert
Celebrating Earth Day can be as easy as inviting a sustainability expert to give a remote talk or allowing employees to watch an environmental/sustainability focused documentary on work-sponsored time. Here are some of our favorites:
#7: Donate a Portion of Profits Made On Earth Day
Not every company can be a B-Corp or 1% for the Planet member, and that’s okay. Doing what you can, when you can, will still make a difference. If your business makes a daily revenue, consider donating a percentage of the profits you make on Earth Day to an environmental organization that works to combat issues such as climate change. If you earn your revenue on a monthly or quarterly basis, you can divide those numbers up by 30 or 90 to get your estimated daily revenue. If you want to go further, donate a portion of sales from the entire month to a good cause!