We’ve kicked off an annual ‘Sustainabilty Award’ for our staff, where they get to submit ideas about how we at the Village can enhance the environmental impact of what we do here on a daily basis. An entry is selected each year for trial in a real-life setting and, if it proves workable, it earns its submitter the $100 Sustainability Award.
The inaugural winner of the Village’s Sustainability Award for 2019 is Jo Clapton, who works in our Village Support team, the team who deliver cares in the homes of our village residents. She not only made suggestions on how we might replace items of daily use with more sustainable alternatives, but she went the extra mile to locate and source substitutes.
As a result of Jo’s work we have now replaced plastic with other materials, mostly sustainably-sourced paper, across a wide range of activities. Gone are plastic straws, teaspoons, office bin-liners and even medication ‘pottles’, the storage units into which patients’ daily medications are placed.
This initiative is backed up by discussion sessions with staff on how we might reuse, recycle and repurpose in pretty-much every aspect of our day-to-day operation.
Certainly, these are all fairly small, low-profile steps. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The grand gestures we make are all very well. But their impact is diminished if we don’t change the multitude of little things we do in our daily lives that are creating such damage to our environment.
