earth, nature, water, sky

5 Ways Your Business Can Help Destroy Earth

Today is Earth Day, a Hallmark holiday dedicated to celebrating Earth’s birthday. Every year people spend millions of dollars on flowers and chocolate, which they then set out on their lawn to pay tribute to Earth. This has been going on for nearly 4.5 billion years.

In honor of this wasteful day, I’ve come up with 4 and a half ways (yes I rounded up in the title) your business can help to end this madness.

1. Never, I repeat, NEVER buy local

Local businesses are terrible. If you work for a local business, you’re probably a terrible person. We’re all too familiar with those warm smiles and kind greetings you receive when you walk through the door – they’re totally faking it. My suggestion for the next time you need to buy a box of highlighters is to find a globe, find your location on that globe, look on the side of the globe exactly opposite from your location, and find a piece of land as close as you can. Order your highlighters from that location and make sure you FedEx it overnight. If you’ve chosen a place that speaks the same language as you, you probably haven’t gone far enough.

earth, gold, field, straw
Photo: pexels.com

By choosing a place on the opposite side of the globe, the frustration you feel in being unable to communicate with the local shop owner is completely genuine – none of that warm, fake-smile stuff. While it may be a bit more expensive to ship it overnight via FedEx, you’re helping increase the amount of fuel being burned (oil drillers have mouths to feed too), which will ultimately help put Earth out of its misery. I mean come on, you wouldn’t let a dying animal suffer, would you?

2. ALWAYS keep every single light on, especially incandescent lights

Let us all pay homage to Thomas Edison, that tenacious bastard who never knew when to quit. He made a damn fine light bulb. Few things feel better than the warm, blinding glow of several 120w incandescent light bulbs placed in close proximity to one another. Don’t deny yourself this simple pleasure by being stingy, just turn on the lights – ALL of them. I don’t care if it’s daylight out.

Not sure if you’ve got enough sockets to handle it? Got a gas-powered generator laying around? Fire that bad boy up and plug in some lamps. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself later when you see a spider crawling across the office floor into a dark corner…oh wait! You don’t have any dark corners!

3. Use things as few times as possible, preferably only once

Could you imagine if you were the proud owner of a disposable spork company, and someone came up to you and said they’d been using the same spork all week long in their lunchbox? You would be PISSED! First off, that’s disgusting. Second off, why would someone maliciously attack a company by denying them their fair share of business? Is it to fuel their selfish needs? Is the extra it costs really just too much? Give me one good reason.

4. Offer incentives to employees who ride a bus to work

I’ve always said that if everyone sold their tiny “gas saving” car and bought their own bus, the world would be a much happier place. Case in point:

  • You would never have to worry about employees leaving an important document at home, because they could just keep it in their bus.
  • There would be no more “I totaled my car this morning and am going to be late to work,” because buses are pretty indestructible.
  • You would always know when your employees arrive at work just by the loud roar of their bus engine.

While yes, it will require more parking space, I’m pretty sure you have a creepy forest next door you could easily tear down and make into a parking lot.

forest, trees, earth
Photo: pexels.com

4½. Subscribe and follow

If you really want more details on how to put Earth out of its sad existence, subscribe to my blog and follow me on Twitter @spencerlewis88.