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Saturday, 18 April 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Participants of Expolanka and Expo Freight Earth Hour Competition adopt environmentally friendly activities to celebrate Earth Hour
Expolanka and Expo Freight (EFL) initiated their environmental campaign to celebrate Earth Hour with a series of activities. Among them was an ‘Earth Hour Competition’ for their Facebook audience for the second consecutive year. The competition which strives to reward environmentally friendly behaviour and spread awareness about sustainable practices is one of a series of endeavours of Expolanka and Expo Freight to contribute meaningfully to the worldwide Earth Hour movement.
In addition to the competition, Expolanka and EFL together with YES FM launched the Planet Watch radio campaign which focused on building awareness about a number of topics including green energy, transportation, sustainable development, conservation and bio diversity, recycling and waste reduction, etc. The same campaign was also aired on Dialog TV encouraging people to protect mother earth and also to remind them to switch off their lights for one hour and support the Earth Hour program. Mass media was also used to promote the values of Earth Hour and drive listener traffic towards the Expolanka Earth Hour Facebook challenge. On 28 March, Expolanka CSR encouraged employees and social media audience alike to show their commitment towards Earth Hour by switching off all lights between 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Speaking about the activities Expolanka Holdings Head of Marketing, Corporate Communications and CSR Paddy Weerasekera said, “We are proud to be a part of the Earth Hour global movement and show our support in protecting the environment. Expolanka was one of the first corporate supporters of the Earth Hour program five years ago. This year we not only carried out a campaign to build awareness among the general public but also engaged them in actually doing something to show support using social media which is now a powerful platform. We were pleased with the overwhelming response we received. And I believe that we achieved our dual purpose of using this tool to spread awareness about the importance of green practices and initiate a discussion about possible activities each and every one of us can adopt to save mother earth.”
The competitors were asked to post an authentic photograph or a video of an environmentally friendly activity and describe the said activity briefly. Expolanka and EFL CSR chose three winning activities out of over 100 submissions, rewarding each of the three winners with a cash prize of Rs. 10,000. The other accepted entrants won free Earth Hour ‘Change the World’ t-shirts.
Competition entries portrayed various methods of reducing waste, saving energy and re-cycling such as composting food waste, switching to energy saving methods, reusing plastic and stopping the use of polythene.
‘Earth Hour’ is the world’s largest voluntary environmental campaign to fight climate change and it was held this year on Saturday 28 March from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. where everyone was humbly requested to switch off all non-essential lights as a symbolic act to support this cause. Sri Lanka is part in this global event initiated by WWF with Expolanka becoming a national partner for the ‘Earth Hour’ event to take place in this country.
Expolanka and EFL have been partners of Earth Hour for the last few years and will continue to support this global movement. In-line with Earth Hour this year they engaged in a number of projects including conducting an energy audit to determine ways to reduce company energy consumption, awareness programs aimed at youth and children and a mass media campaign to educate people on global warming and how they can contribute to stop it.
