Every year, April is an important date in our calendar – we celebrate Earth Month, a global campaign in the countries where Amazon operates. We feel responsible for the well-being of the local communities where our employees live and work, and we want to raise awareness and build pro-environmental habits not only among our employees, but also their families and loved ones. This year, our volunteers collaborated on activities with seven local non-profit organizations from the Central and Eastern Europe region, while all employees could contribute to various pro-ecological events all month long.
A joint action for nature
In April, Amazon employees and our social partners took matters into their own hands, equipped with appropriate bags and gloves, to take care of local communities and areas where our employees live and work. Volunteers from all logistics centres in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia participated; bags with collected waste were counted, and the centre that collected the most waste received a financial donation, which it could pass on to a chosen organisation supporting environmental activities. A special thank you to the team from our PRG2 site in the Czech Republic, which collected over 9,000 litres of trash.
Throughout the whole month, we also encouraged our employees to take local action for the community – by creating community gardens, educating their loved ones, participating in tree planting, and logistics centres donating to environmental NGOs.
As part of the campaign, our Polish logistics centres cooperated with the Polish Red Cross and other local non-profit organisations held events from April 15-22, during which our volunteers cleaned up urban areas in Sosnowiec, Wrocław, Poznań, and Gliwice, among others; Czech fulfilment centres joined forces with a local organisation in Dobroviz and organized a cleaning event on April 19; and our employees in Slovakia, together with representatives of the municipality of Sered, cleaned up their local area on May 5.
Trees for #AmazonEarthMonth
Throughout April, we invited our employees to contribute to building more sustainable habits and to post them on social media with the #AmazonEarthMonth hashtag. We also created a virtual Earth Month photobooth to make it easier to promote the importance of pro-environmental actions and sustainable habits. For every published photo, we will donate a tree to be planted on behalf of the employee.
Concrete, positive change
The first edition of Amazon Earth Month in the CEE region has received a lot of interest from our employees and local communities, resulting in a real positive change. As part of this year's campaign, over 100 Amazon volunteers participated, collecting over 20,000 litres of waste and planting 45 different plants, including trees, bushes, flowers. In addition, over 6,000 PRC volunteers joined Amazon and took part in various Earth Month activities.
Our commitment to supporting our local communities concentrate on the holistic wellbeing of our neighbours. That is why in April we prepared special celebrations not only for Earth Day, but also for World Book and Copyright Day. To celebrate the occasion this year, we announced new readership projects that we are preparing with the Zaczytani Foundation to answer social needs in the CEE region. Thanks to our Kindloteka readership and STEM program, we have a unique opportunity to promote the magic of books with Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian readers. We also strengthened our commitment to tackling mental health issues in Poland, pairing up with the TVN Foundation in a nationwide renovation of psychological wards called “Healthy Minds”. With these concrete actions, we want to ensure that our local communities live in a safe, sustainable, and comfortable environment.
