How can you be a positive force in the world? What can you do to improve your community, your project, your planet, or your life? This was the topic for Hennebery Eddy’s Earth Day celebration, a festive pin-up sharing our net-positive impact stories.
In our office work, we aspire to design net-positive spaces that reflect and respond to the natural environment and the people who use them. The result is a healthy, efficient, and adaptive net-positive outcome for clients, users, and the planet. In our pin-up, we reflected on that mission — and took it a step further, by looking at our personal net-positive experiences, too.
This topic has been on our minds as we wrap up participation in another inspiring EcoChallenge with the Northwest Earth Institute and Project Drawdown. From lessons learned on our design projects, to reflections on our connection to the natural world and tips we picked up from Drawdown’s research or our own, here’s what we shared.
- Ways to reduce your waste stream: invest in reusable produce bags and bamboo toothbrushes, join the office GoBox account, swap single-use dryer sheets for natural wool dryer balls, sign up for “ugly produce” services like Imperfect Produce, bike to work.
- Ways to build community: support a local youth center that offers non-school activities, reconnect to the outdoors – in national parks or your own neighborhood, volunteer to revitalize derelict neighborhoods, help others in need, share public resources like transit and libraries, share your net-positive values with your kids, design healthy and safe spaces that promote interaction.
- Ways to promote sustainable design: offer multiple options to achieve goals, research and brainstorm cost-saving alternatives that make net-zero energy or water feasible, focus on solving problems for end users, find ways to bring nature inside, advocate at every chance.
We also celebrated some recent success stories: the Bend Science Station will perform at net-positive energy when complete, and the Portland International Airport Concourse E extension is on track to achieve LEED Gold certification. All of our stories remain pinned up to help inspire our projects and our daily lives.
