It is one of life’s true wonders as to where we can draw inspiration. The drive of a young child’s passion and imagination can be truly infectious. Following the usual conversations from picking up my own children from school and routine questions of; “How was your day?”, “Did you eat your lunch?”, “What have you been learning about?”, I was recently taken aback, because far from the usual reports of “it was fine” or “it was ok” and my children quickly wanting to get onto more pressing matters for them, like “what’s for tea?”, my eldest daughter was really quite buzzing about a project that was being launched in school about the devastating impacts of plastic in the sea. There was a fire and passion within her, a spark had been lit and I was as keen to find out more as she was to tell me all about it.
In my eyes anything that promotes and protects the environment for this and any future generation has always been admirable. After all, I am from a generation that precedes the recycling domestic collection bins. When I was at school we were just getting the message about cleaning out your bottles and keeping your newspapers so that you could take them to the local recycling banks in the supermarket car parks at the weekend. Fortunately, children today have grown up with constant messages about looking after the planet, recycling and not wasting the planet’s precious resources.
Going out of your way to protect the environment seemed to be some new age concept when I was young, the next bright idea that you could jump on the bandwagon, but today is the accepted default position for many and a natural way of living a sustainable lifestyle. However, it was amazing to see my child wanting to know more and more. It had reminded us both about a news story we had seen recently about a group of Scottish school children campaigning to ban plastic straws in their village because they kept seeing them wash up on their shoreline.
The conversation with my child just snowballed more and more, we talked about how much plastic we use at home, our family’s recycling habits, what the impacts of using paper has on the environment and even how much paper we thought was used by her school that she attends.
My child then started connecting the dots herself; if that is how much paper my school uses, what about all the schools in the country? What about where daddy works and where Grandpa used to work in his office? I was pleased to tell her on this point alone that where mummy works, their sole purpose is to help companies and organisations reduce the amount of paper they use. I did not go into the details with her how this benefits those organisations from a strategic or decision-making perspective, but from a purely environmental point of view, and how Esker offers document management solutions in the ‘cloud’ designed to eliminate the paper and inefficiencies associated with bringing money in and sending payments out of an organisation.
It actually made me feel really good explaining to her about how much Esker really does positively impact on protecting the environment.
Written by Georgina Kershaw – Esker Marketing Campaign Coordinator
