Cisco’s Doing What on Earth Day?

Oh so much!

First of all, we don’t consider Earth Day as just one day in the year when we implement a few feel-good actions that temporarily improve our environment. We consider Earth Day a great opportunity to reach out to our 68,000+ global employees to highlight today’s most pressing environmental issues — to educate them about what Cisco is doing, and to guide them in what they can do every day of the year to reduce their impact on the environment.

Ok, so now that I have that off of my chest, what exactly is Cisco doing this Earth Day, April 22, 2014?  Well, besides continuing to 1) develop technologies like Cisco TelePresence video conferencing and Cisco WebEx web conferencing, which have proven to reduce environmental impacts and 2) implement many energy efficiency and renewable energy projects (like this solar project) to meet our aggressive corporate sustainability goals, we are holding a number of Earth Day events for employees across the globe.

These events will help spread the message of Earth Day to all of our employees and contractors working at Cisco and inspire them to reduce their environmental impact every day of the year. Here is a sampling of some of these events:

• Holding our annual Recycle IT Day, when employees can drop off personal e-scrap material (e.g. old computers, TVs, media and network equipment, etc.) free of charge to be recycled at one of Cisco’s authorized recyclers. Last year, we had 118 Recycle IT events across the globe and collected over 450,000 pounds of e-scrap
• Promoting and encouraging employee participation in the Earth Day Network’s Billion Acts of Green through a friendly competition where employees will submit their personal “acts of green” and vote on the actions they believe are most creative and impactful
• Supporting an Eat Locally campaign at some of our campus cafeterias to promote the use of locally-sourced and more sustainable foods
• Welcoming a local high school class to tour and learn about Cisco’s electric vehicle charging stations at our Lawrenceville, Georgia campus
• Holding a webinar hosted by independent think tank SustainAbility to share findings and engage in a discussion  with Cisco employees about their new research report, Model Behavior: 20 Business Model Innovations for Sustainability
• Showcasing various energy efficiency and renewable energy projects and giving out hundreds of spruce saplings to be planted during a special employee awareness event at our campus in Kanata, Ontario
• Holding a virtual Earth Day game for employees and partners based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma gaming theory that challenges people to explore their decision-making and the tradeoffs between self-interest versus greater good

I’d love to hear about what you’re doing to celebrate Earth Day this year.  And if you have any suggestions on what Cisco can do in the future, we’re all ears, so comment away.

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