In the past year, we’ve worked hard to turn challenges into opportunities, and we’ve done just that, which has expanded our impact. The first half of the year saw more Covid-cancellations of live events, including our own St. Louis Earth Day Festival.

Without a live Festival in April 2021, we instead promoted Earth Month with multiple Days of Resilience for engagement including: virtually hosting our own Keynote Speaker with Mary Ann Lazarus  and a dance performance,  distributing 430 Earth Day Celebration Kits to local participants, creating a Green Dining Week, promoting and presenting at the Global Freshwaters Summit and coordinating 3 volunteer Environmental Justice Days of Action cleanups!

We took time to reflect on our programs and mission to strategically reposition ourselves to better serve our St. Louis region. Thus, our new mission inspired new program directions: To inspire and mobilize a collaborative movement towards an equitable and environmentally sustainable St. Louis region – every day. Emerging from this process the staff and board engaged in bimonthly anti-racism trainings with each other to learn and grow with an on-going commitment to increase our capacity to stay engaged. 

 Regional Marketing Campaign

The writing is on the wall that wasted food is a global climate change issue and a food justice issue so we developed new programming to address it locally. We implemented a region-wide messaging campaign to reduce food waste with graphics showing how the average cost of wasted food ($1,300/year) could otherwise be spent.

Food Scraps Composting

We staffed booths at two farmers markets to collect residential food scraps. Often, concerned residents only have one option for food waste: throw it in the landfill. We created opportunities for residents to learn about reducing food waste, composting in their backyard or through a curbside composting collection business, or, to bring it to us to get composted through Total Organics Recycling and St. Louis Composting. In its first year, the earthday365’s Farmers’ Market Food Scraps Drop Off booths collected, from 37 subscribers,  1.2 tons of food scraps to compost. We also collected and composted over 150 pumpkins after Halloween!

Recycling On the Go Events

We continued to provide staffing and recycling at area events that started coming live in June. With only 7 seasonal staff, we still worked 24 events and rented equipment to 6 others collecting 6.5 tons of recycling, 6.5 tons of compost and engaging over 90,000 people with recycling education and service.

Environmental Justice Days of Action

In ongoing partnership with communities struggling with illegal dumping, earthday365 organized ten Environmental Justice Days of Action utilized 318 volunteers and collected 730 pounds of recycling and 15,385 pounds of trash over this past year that had been illegally dumped in neighborhoods and parks. During this effort in April, we utilized a Community Science mobile app (Marine Debris Tracker) to provide valuable litter information about the Mississippi River watershed from St. Paul, MN to Baton Rouge, LA. We also helped The North County Agricultural Education Center plant potatoes in the spring and clean up their garden beds in the fall.

Green Dining Alliance

We were thrilled to launch earthday365’s 4th Green Dining District in The Grove with another successful Green Curbside Hop event in October.  We continue to assist our 110 Green Dining Alliance restaurant members in meeting their sustainability goals, pushing farther every year.

New Staff and Board Members

We added to earthday365’s strong team with the hiring of Ben Daugherty as our Green Dining Alliance Program Manager and Janessa Jenkins as our Communications and Marketing Manager. We also added three new Board Members: Lisa Johnson, Charles Bryson and Joyce Gorrell, so we are ready to take on whatever 2022 has in store for us!

St. Louis Earth Day Festival and Kind Box

Looking forward to 2022, earthday365 is planning for our St. Louis Earth Day Festival to return to Forest Park April 23-24 and we’re poised to launch our new reusable to-go ware program, Kind Box, in select GDA restaurants. Member diners will be able to select their takeout order in a returnable container which we wash/sanitize and return to restaurants for another use. Be kind to the earth with Kind Box.

We hope you will continue to support us and follow us on social media and most definitely, we hope to see you at the Festival in Forest Park!

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