Environmental Citizenship
UTC Foundation
Taking Care of Our Earth
In championing environmental citizenship, we are striving to develop a culture of responsibility for our impact on the environment. Our initiatives hold us accountable for our actions and help build awareness of the effect we have on our world.
On International Coastal Cleanup Day, we partnered with the Institute of Marine Affairs for Phase 1 of the coastal rehabilitation at the Foreshore in Cocorite.
We committed to preserving nature on Paperless and Plastic-Free Days. We started off with a paperless day, which was a great success, saving the Corporation close to TT $50,000 in stationery costs on that one day! We then upped the ante and went paperless for a week, reducing paper consumption costs by TT $250,000.
On the National Day of Caring, we partnered with United Way Trinidad & Tobago, IAMovement and National Quarries to work on the Rehabilitation of Quarries Project — a four-year initiative aimed at rehabilitating abandoned quarry pits in Valencia.
We’ve planted trees and learned more about the vital role forests play in maintaining our fragile ecosystem. Together with the Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project, our in-house Reputation Management Team created a pilot project aimed at replanting hillsides under stress from being ravaged by annual bush fires. We planted a variety of fruit and hardwood trees, and interspersed them with crops to minimise further degradation.
As a team, we understood what such rehabilitation works entailed, as well as the value of organic practices, erosion control, watershed protection and wildlife conservation.
We know that change begins with the individual. As a responsible corporate citizens, we are concerned with managing our energy usage. We initiated an Energy Audit to identify energy conservation measures, focusing on ways to bring efficiency to our lighting and our air conditioning. The data we collected will give us an opportunity to streamline our overall energy usage, help reduce costs and conserve energy.