#SustainCP

During the second week of my internship, I was lucky enough to go to Prague for a programme. I was excited to be in a new country and to experience a culture that I was never been exposed to. While at the programme, however, I became increasingly frustrated by the amount of recyclables that were ending up in the waste bin. Programme participants and staff, including my co-workers were throwing plastic and large amounts of paper away. At the end of each day, I had to round up clean pieces of paper and handed them to the venue coordinator for disposal in his private bin. Passing it off as a cultural difference, I focused my attention on programmes in England when I came back to the United Kingdom. After doing another program in London, I recognised that some of the waste on programmes could be diverted if our team took time to pay attention to the waste we bring to programmes.

Weeks later, as I was going through participant feedback, I noticed that there was a trend in the concern of our team’s waste on programmes. Programme participants around the world were saying they would have rated our programme higher if we paid more attention to our waste and recycling. With this in mind, I began speaking to people in our organisation to gain insight into our current efforts to reduce waste on programmes. My first idea was to create comic strips in the company newsletter with tips to reduce waste on programme days. After speaking to senior leaders in our company, I realised that I needed to narrow down my focus, and prioritise my immediate team first.

At this stage, I started working with our company CEO to create a plan for more sustainable programmes. At first, we spoke for a few minutes about my ideas and he gave me some guiding questions to consider as I was creating a plan for our team. Every few days, I sent him a revised version of my plan to which he would reply with more probing and detail-oriented questions.

Currently, we are still in the brainstorming change. It has been a great experience knowing that I have been allowed to tackle an issue that I recognised in the company. Furthermore, I was able to convince our company CEO that this kind of initiative was important because of our participant feedback. I believe that our horizontal organisational structure, paired with the necessity of the initiative allowed me to take the lead on such a project. I am very excited to see how my changes will be implemented.