Bring Your Own Chopsticks! Save Our Forest!

Bring Your Own Chopsticks! Save Our Forest!

2008 Worldwide Volunteer Week
Sun Microsystems Beijing Engineering Research Institute

On May 8, 2008, ten volunteers from Sun China Engineering Research Institute together with two helpers from Greenpeace China held an activity named "Bring Your Own Chopsticks! Save Our Forest!" In China, there are a lot of restaurants that provide disposable chopsticks to customers. We have to cut down many trees to make disposable chopsticks. We need to protect our forest and our environment. We need to persuade restaurants that provide people with disposable chopsticks not to do that. We need to encourage people to refuse to use the disposable chopsticks. Bring Your Own Chopsticks! Save Our Forest!

In this event, our venue was the biggest cafeteria in the office building complex where Sun employees work. It is relevant to our campaign. During the 3-hour event, about 2000 people came to lunch and had to walk by our booth and bench. They could see the Sun logo and banner on the wall and Greenpeace banner surrounding the bench.

We successfully attracted more than 600 people to stop by and listen to what we had to say. We got 350 stickers/signatures promising not to use the disposable chopsticks in the future.

A Finnish TV station heard about and came to this event. Our Sun employee Paul Lee took part of their interview explaining the activity and also explaining Sun's worldwide volunteer week. All volunteers worked enthusiastically with the crowd to bring the environmental awareness into focus, and to encourage them to take actions to protect our forest.

We feel proud to be involved and proud to be Sun employees leading this effort in China.

[N.B.]
I wrote this report together with my good friend Jian Li who took the initiative to start this project a month ago. It is an opportunity to join him and to promulgate this idea and initiative. I treasure this association with him very much since it is precious for me to see this effort in the fast-moving Chinese society. With his permission, I included this in my blog.