What planet are you on? One practical action to reduce our climate impact this Christmas
This week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take part in the Design Council’s — Design for Planet event. Kudos to Lucy Tallon Head of Design at Co-op Digital for making it happen and giving the Digital product and design teams the space to take part.
After two days of talks and workshops, an active internal slack channel and a lot of notes, I am still processing all of the insights, learnings and perspectives from the event. Did anyone see the BBC climate at 50c documentary last night! We should not have to resort to feed animals cardboard due to droughts, dig 25m in the ground to get water or families forced to desert their ancestral lands due to a lack of water.
We need to consume less
One solid take away for me is that we need to consume less. Western consumerism plays a huge part in carbon emissions. Yes big companies and countries are major polluters but we the consumers buying products that we rapidly consume add to the emissions. We need to be more intentional around our consumerist behaviours.
Given we’re 43 days from Christmas it’s rather serendipitous that at the conference there was a talk that highlighted a great initiative called Un Gifted.
Sustainable secret Santa has arrived — will you give it a go?
Many businesses and teams are continuing with remote working, so this December is still not going to be the same pre-pandemic office party, and even if you are getting together with colleagues or friends — we can all do with less cheap tat!
Given a lot of contacts in my networks work in agile multi-disciplinary teams I’m sure there will be lots of folks thinking about what to do for festive team activities.
So one simple step to reduce our carbon footprint this Christmas is ditching the secret Santa tat.
It starts with taking one action at a time. The CX design team I work with have all agreed we want to have a sustainable secret Santa and I am looking forward to receiving a un-gift that will be more impactful than any other secret Santa. Here’s to Ungifts that help to save the planet.
https://ungiftedsecretsanta.com/
Next-up — I’ll be sharing details of a sustainable advent calendar fundraiser I will be doing to raise money for charity.
