At LiveWest, we are Creating Greener Futures Together. Every month, we share some of our favourite green advice, to help our customers and colleagues live more sustainably.
As it is Earth Day this month, we are sharing some ideas on how you can celebrate, plus an insight into what we are doing as an organisation to be more sustainable - on Earth Day and every day.
What is Earth Day?
Every year on 22 April, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
An annual day of action, Earth Day aims to raise awareness of the climate crisis and create global, national and local policy changes. Each year it is celebrated by over one billion people around the world.
The theme for this years’ Earth Day is Invest in Our Planet.
Earth Day have shared their top campaigns to Invest in Our Planet, from ending plastics to planting trees. We have broken these down into some simple actions that you can take at home, and that we are working on too.
How you can Invest in Our Planet this Earth Day
As an individual, you have the power to make your voice heard. What each of us does, and how we do it, has a huge ripple effect on our ecosystems, our communities, and on the actions of others.
Here are a few ways you can Invest in Our Planet this Earth Day:
Climate literacy
Earth Day are campaigning for climate and environmental literacy - meaning they want every citizen to be educated on the environment, so they can make informed choices to protect the planet. You can find out more and support Earth Day’s Climate and Environmental Literacy campaign on their website.
To get involved at home, you can learn more about the environment and how to live sustainably. Our green advice pages are a great place to start, as they are full of simple tips and advice to help you make sustainable choices at home.
As well as sharing green advice on our website and social media channels, we are also promoting climate literacy through our partnership with the University of Exeter’s award-winning Green Consultants programme. Through the programme, we offer valuable work experience to students studying an environmental degree, helping them to access green jobs when they graduate.
End plastics
Plastic harms marine and human health, and litters beaches and landscapes. Earth Day’s End Plastic campaign aims to educate on the impacts of plastic pollution and promote everyday actions to reduce plastic pollution.
You can reduce the amount of plastic in your home by:
- Choosing cleaning products that don’t come in plastic packaging, such as boxes of detergent and bars of soap.
- In the supermarket, buy loose fruit and vegetables, instead of ones that come wrapped in plastic.
- When shopping for clothes, choose clothing made of natural fabrics, like cotton, and avoid synthetic fabrics, like polyester.
- If you have pets, choose ceramic food bowls and pet food that comes packaged in a can, instead of plastic alternatives.
Lots of towns now have a zero-waste store where you can buy food, household cleaning items and beauty products by weight. You could celebrate Earth Day by taking some reusable containers to your local zero-waste shop and doing a plastic-free weekly shop.
At LiveWest, we are helping to end plastics by phasing out single use plastic at our offices and in our building materials.
Plant trees
Earth Day’s Canopy Project plants trees across the globe.
You can celebrate Earth Day by doing some planting in your garden or green space – April is the perfect time for planting wildflowers, so why not follow this guide to make your garden bloom?
Did you know that we have 39,676 trees across our developments, which remove 6.1 tonnes of pollution from the air each year?
We are rewilding grassed areas in our existing communities and ensuring biodiversity net-gain in our new developments, enhancing our communities.
Global Clean-up
Earth Day’s Great Global Cleanup aims to rid the world of waste and plastic pollution for good.
You can celebrate Earth Day by joining a community clean up. Our Community Connectors regularly organise litter picks in our communities. You can join our LiveWest Connecting Communities Facebook group to find out about events in your community.
As well as organising community clean-ups, we are also reducing pollution by sending zero waste from our three main offices to landfill.
Sustainable fashion
The average person today buys 60% more clothing than they did 15 years ago, but they keep these clothes for only half as long, wearing them, on average, as few as 10 times before throwing them away. These clothes end up on landfills or in incinerators, polluting the planet.
Earth Day’s Fashion for the Earth campaign aims to change this.
You can get involved at home by shopping less and only buying what you need. When you go shopping, choose second-hand clothes and clothes made from natural materials, like cotton, instead of synthetic materials, like polyester.
Why not celebrate Earth Day by hosting a clothes-swap with your friends and family? Or spend the day learning to repair and adjust clothing, so you can keep the clothes you buy for longer.
We recently held clothes swap events in our offices, encouraging our colleagues to bring in clothes they didn’t wear any more, and swap them out for new items from someone else’s wardrobe.
Find out more about shopping sustainably on our Shopping green advice page.
Creating Greener Futures Together at LiveWest
As a business, we recognise our responsibility to have a positive impact on our planet and we know that we need to act now to drive green innovation and create a more sustainable future.
We believe that sustainable homes, neighbourhoods, and communities are at the heart of what it means to deliver a home for everyone. At the very core of our business lies the ambition to deliver better social and environmental outcomes for our customers.
For more information on what we are doing to create greener futures together, you can visit our Sustainability page, or view our Roadmap to Net Zero.
This infographic offers an insight into a few of the actions that we are taking as a business to invest in our planet.
