Earth Day and the CRO

CRO members and readers celebrate the holiday.

Started in 1970 in response to growing concern about environmental issues and integral to the passage of many important environmental laws since, Earth Day is now celebrated in more than 175 countries and coordinated by the Earth Day Network. Below, the events and initiatives some of the CRO members and readers undertook April 22:

For the week leading up to Earth Day, Ecolab Inc. celebrated Earth Week in downtown St. Paul. As part of Capitol River Council’s Earth Week Downtown, Ecolab sponsored the Adopt-A-Block Streets Clean Up, bringing downtown workers and residents together to clean litter and debris from the street, while the week’s other activities included an information fair and a “Cell Phone for Soldiers” campaign to collect used phones.

IBM announced that it processed over 100 million pounds of used and obsolete computer gear, as part of its product end-of-life management operations worldwide in 2006, returning less than 1 percent of non-hazardous material to landfills.

A few of the international events Intel sponsored included The Earth is in Your Hands Day in Shanghai, where students from about 30 schools kicked off a contest to use Intel-provided recycling materials (office, packaging, etc.) to make a model of a robot to be judged in June. At the Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., the plan was recycling office materials into classroom science projects and painting and maintaining a home and yard of an elderly disabled person, while water conservation and a switch bulb campaign were hot topics in India and the Philippines, respectively.

Mattel sponsored a local Earth Day in El Segundo, Calif.

Net Impact NY Professionals Chapter will host the “At Home in the World” conference on April 25 in New York, featuring speakers Kate Dayton, Founder of Green Courage, a distributor of eco-conscious choices for the home and office and Roo Rogers, Co-Founder of OZOcar, New York's first hybrid private car service.

Starbucks continues to be a proud sponsor of the Earth Day Network (www.earthday.org), a resource for people who want to participate locally and/or learn more about the impacts their decisions have on the environment.

The Timberland Company focused its annual Earth Day efforts on hosting more than 9,000 volunteers at 170 service events around the globe, which focused on reforestation through activities such as planting trees, refurbishing trails and greenways and restoring native species. The activities support the company’s larger goal to become carbon neutral by 2010.

Washington Mutual teamed up with the National Arbor Day Foundation to help plant one million tress in the fire-damaged national forests across the U.S., donating one tree for every WaMu customer who signs up for online statements in the next six months.

(Lead picture: Intel in Costa Rica. Interior picture: Timberland in Bedford, England.)