Enjoy this beautiful day

This is an ongoing series to illustrate each of the icons from our 50 Ways to Help.

We used to keep the studio frig stocked with bottled water. It was an easy way for us to stay hydrated, and we always had a drink to offer visitors.

But then Earth Day rolled around, and we began working on a few shirts to celebrate the day.  As we were researching ideas for the shirt, we started evaluating how we ran our office. We’d all been pretty environmentally-conscious folks, but we definitely saw room for improvement.

One of the most obvious things to change would be our water bottle habit. In fact, it was such an obvious, well-publicized idea that it didn’t even make it onto the shirt. But it became the first change we made in our office, installing a water filter on our faucet. Everyone has mugs or refillable travel bottles. We estimate over the course of the year this saves, at the minimum, 1,000 plastic bottles.

This works great for us, but I always get a bit nervous when it comes time to offer a visitor a beverage. Offering a bottle of water does seem to have this air of civility to it, as opposed to simply turning on the tap. But nearly every time, when I hand over a glass of water and explain the change we’ve made, our visitors comment that they’re making similar changes in their own world, too.