As seen on BigSpeak.com

This year BigSpeak created our very own Green Team with the goal of making our company the best environmental steward it can possibly be. In the past 5 years, we’ve experienced hyper-growth that’s doubled our company in size. There’s a lot of new faces in the office, so many we’re actually moving to a bigger space.

We’re incredibly excited and grateful for the developments we’ve seen within BigSpeak recently, but all this growth leads to a harsh realization. Now that we have a full staff it’s not as easy to monitor our environmental footprint. When there was only a handful of employees it was easy to run on the honor system when it came to green-living best practices. As we’ve grown, it’s become more difficult to make sure we’re scaling in an environmentally friendly way and there isn’t any unnecessary waste.

So, the Green Team was born to help our company become a unified force to protect our planet the best we can. We surveyed some of the businesses we thought did it best, worked with local environmental agencies and took our employees needs into consideration to come up with our mission statement:

It is our strong belief that both individuals and our organization can maintain a high standard of living and profitability while conducting ourselves and our business in an environmentally responsible manner. Our team is about positive change as it promotes behavior and attitude transformation in a fun supportive and non-judgmental manner.

Changes so far

Since our founding in August of 2019, we’ve made some significant headway. After consulting with the City of Santa Barbara’s Recycling Coordinator we came up with ideas that would make the biggest impact. Our biggest take away from our time with the Recycling Coordinator was while recycling is better than trash, the best possible thing you can do is to reuse and avoid single-use plastics.

From there, the Green Team revamped the office snack counter, switching from individually wrapped treats to buying in bulk and storing in refillable mason jars. We also updated the processes for lunch deliveries. To reduce carbon emissions we choose to order lunches from places within walking distance or as close as possible, bringing our own reusable jars for sauces and requesting minimal or no wasteful packaging when possible.

We also encourage and support our employees to eliminate waste from their lives by providing them with reusable coffee mugs and insulated water bottles. To kick off the holiday season employees could opt into a Wellness Challenge that incorporates cutting down on single-use plastic, carpooling and reducing meat and dairy consumption. The winner gets a hefty prize along with complete adoration from the Green Team.

We have consolidated our office supplies across all departments and designated a manager to ensure there are no redundancies and wasted supplies. The manager has also researched and switched all supplies that can be made eco-friendly to their healthier counterparts.

With the renovations of our new office building, Chairman and Founder Jonathan Wygant has brought on an architect who specializes in environmentally friendly designs to consult and guide BigSpeak to reach Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification.

Things for you to consider with us

We’re proud of the sustainable changes we’ve made so far, and the small changes are fueling us to continue the change. Ideas we are working to implement:

• Stipend for biking, walking, or carpooling to work to reduce carbon emissions
• A company bike rack or bus pass
• Company composting or working with a third party to compost our waste
• A carbon offset program to counteract the carbon emission our industry creates through plane transportation of keynote speakers
• Eco-friendly material to build and design our new office (restored wood, thrifted furniture)