Ubiq Celebrates Earth Month 2022
Updated: Jul 10
We all have to start somewhere, right? Get a glimpse into the beginning of Ubiq's sustainability journey.
We should have more than one day a year to celebrate the Earth, especially with the climate emergency ever-accelerating. That is why we took the opportunity to extend the Earth Day celebrations throughout the entire month of April. This included a full itinerary of educational opportunities, earth-friendly activities, and action points for the rest of the year.
Raising Awareness
The first step to solving a problem is becoming aware that the problem even exists. That’s why we chose to start the month off by raising awareness about climate change. Our goal was to create a solid foundation for the entire Ubiq team from which to understand why sustainability is so important.
Sustainability 101 Ubiq offers an opportunity to all of its employees to share knowledge about topics they’re passionate about. We call this Ubiq Academy. This month’s topic was obviously sustainability.
In our Sustainability 101 Talk, we focused on several topics such as the effects of climate change on the liveability of our planet, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDG’s, measuring our existing carbon footprint via scope level emissions, reducing and offsetting emissions, and steps that we can take to live more sustainably, like eating more plant-based food, buying fair-trade products, or switching to renewable energy providers.
David Attenborough’s “A Life on Our Planet”
It’s one thing to see a presentation on climate change, but entirely another to see someone’s personal witness statement where they provide first hand accounts of the damage that we’ve done to our planet. That’s why we hosted a movie night to watch David Attenborough’s “A Life on Our Planet.”
We walked away having learned about some of the most significant ways in which we, as humans, are harming our planet as well as how all of us have to do our part, both as individuals and as a company, to change our planet’s current trajectory.
Personally Engaging
Living sustainably doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s a process that requires us to not only undue our own patterns of consumption, but also those of generations before us. That feels daunting at times because there are so many problems to solve and the timeline to solve them is getting shorter and shorter. But we have to start somewhere. Why not start with creating habits? Atomic Habits author, James Clear, says that,
“The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. The task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
So we set out, not to uproot the powerful oak, but to plant seeds that everyone on the Ubiq team could try cultivating. For us, that meant hosting events that revolved around topics we all have experience with everyday - food and clothing. Vegan Cooking Night Every piece of food has its own impact on the environment. However, some foods have a much larger impact than others. So why not eat with the planet in mind? That's why we chose to learn how to cook a vegan dish together this month. We made Thai Peanut Ramen and it was delicious!
Check out the recipe here! Perhaps you might consider incorporating it or another vegan dish into your diet?
Clothing Swap
Yep that's right! We're swapping clothes. Why? Well, to give the clothes we don't need a new home with someone else and to obtain some great “new” clothes for ourselves at the same time. This way we can avoid buying harmful fast fashion as the summer season rolls in, but still get to keep our wardrobes new and exciting. This is our way of encouraging the team to rethink shopping.
Taking Action
As a company, we want to form a habit as well - a habit of acting in our planet's best interest. And that's exactly what we did.
Planting Trees Throughout the entire month of April we have committed to planting trees on behalf of our StreetCrowd users. The more moves our crowd-users make, the more trees we will be planting.
We will be planting our trees through GROW MY TREE, who partner organizations in Nepal, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, and India to plant a variety of native species in order to promote biodiversity and reforestation. While the benefits of planting trees can be accomplished worldwide, these countries were chosen in order to achieve more on a social, ecological, and economic level.
Social level – local communities are offered the opportunity for education and training.
Ecological level – more trees can be planted with the same budget due to lower wages and costs for reforestation.
Economic level – trees are planted in areas where poverty is extremely high. This strengthens local communities through long-term employment and income opportunities.
We are currently projecting to plant over 400 trees. On average, each tree absorbs 22kg of CO2 per year, but this depends on the age, location, and type of tree planted. This means that we will be absorbing around 8,800 kg of CO2 over the course of the next year. This is equivalent to 1 million smartphones charged or 9700 pounds of coal burned.
Joining Leaders for Climate Action On Earth Day, CEO & Founder, Christian Adelsberger, applied to join Leaders for Climate Action, stating that, "with this step, I'm looking to accelerate Ubiq's transition toward sustainability and regeneration." LFCA is a non-profit organization that supports companies to systematically take climate action and signals to policy makers that the new economy is ready for stronger political climate action. All members sign The Green Pledge and in doing so aim to make their companies more climate-friendly by:
Appointing a climate offer
Collecting emissions source data
Measuring their carbon footprint
Starting their emissions reduction journey
Ethically offsetting carbon emissions that aren’t able to be reduced, and
Committing to repeating these actions annually.
What did your April look like? Let us know in the comments below 👇
Ubiq enables operators to effectively position fleets to serve strategic goals. For more information, contact sales@ubiq.ai