Our world faces extraordinary challenges that threaten our future. Organizations are expected to play an active role in addressing many of these issues by becoming more responsible in the way they treat the environment, resources, and people.

As a responsible business, Avanade believes we have a collective responsibility to our planet.

That is why at Avanade we are committed to being responsible in everything we do, from our purpose – to make a genuine human impact – to forward-looking leadership and sustainability.

This year, we plan to bring our ethos to life for Earth Day by inviting our people to get involved in several activities focused on environmental sustainability. In this blog, I would like to share a snapshot of the activities we have set up for our people to engage around for Earth Day, although there are also many local activities happening in addition.

We are excited to partner with Accenture and Microsoft for one of our activities. Together, we’ll invite our people to be citizen scientists for the day by volunteering with Zooniverse. Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research; made possible by volunteers, it brings people together to assist professional researchers.  Zooniverse research results in new discoveries and datasets useful to the wider research community.

We’ll be joined by experts from the Adler Planetarium to count penguins, chicks and eggs in the Antarctic and Southern Oceans. We chose this activity because changes in populations of seabirds are likely to reflect changes occurring in the wider ecosystem. Penguins are therefore an excellent indicator of the health of the marine environment.

A second way we are asking our people to support Earth Day is by disposing of their old technology. Every year we all throw away millions of tons of electronic waste: old computers, tablets, mobile phones, televisions and more. All these old electronics contain circuit boards which contain many precious metals including copper, nickel, tin, silver and gold.

By donating our unwanted or old tech devices we can help reduce the harm it does to the environment and ensure the precious metals are recycled and the precious metals are reused, thus avoiding dumping. So, this Earth Day we are asking our teams to drop off their old tech at identified recycling centres and share photos with us to earn points. And we all know points mean prizes!

Finally, we are introducing a great new platform Missions into our organization. The goal of Missions is to educate and encourage us all to take actions, big and small, to help reduce our carbon footprint. Through a series of inspiring challenges, our people can “accept a mission” and change their behaviour towards our planet. We are focusing on six challenges, with something for everyone: Adopting a Sustainable Lifestyle, Lowering Emissions, Reducing Waste, Saving Water, Reducing Energy Consumption and Taking a Stand on Climate Action. People can then track their progress and measure the carbon saved.

Finally, on Earth Day, we are hosting a global all-employee webcast, where the theme and conversations will centre around Earth Day. We have a very exciting line-up of speakers who will showcase how Avanade’s focus on sustainability and innovation is creating a better world for us all.

We plan to continue our internal focus on environmental sustainability through our !nnovate Fest activity, which encourages our people to innovate and find new solutions to global challenges, and our FUEL Conference, aimed at students participating in our STEM Scholarship program. At Avanade, we believe that together, we really can go beyond to invest in our planet this Earth Day.