Local Community Days 2020
For PNO, being a proud B Corp also means donating 15 work hours per employee each year for volunteer work aimed to support local communities. Due to covid-19, many of the activities got cancelled during the first part of the year. Nonetheless, our local teams managed to find and organize volunteer work to be conducted safely and in respect of the rules.
PNO Sweden – Helping the Red Cross
In September, for the second time this year, our Swedish team helped the Red Cross to load sacks with textiles in a truck – which transported them to TEXAID in Germany for recycling. Some of the clothes are trying to be resold, while some garment that is either broken or too dirty recycles to cleaning rags, isolation etc. The goal is zero waste. Our Team’s mission was to load textiles that for various reasons could not be sold.
According to the Red Cross, PNO set a new record in loading time and loaded the highest weight of textiles (14 800 kilos) in the truck in only two hours.
PNO Finland – Supporting Sipoo Municipality
This year our Finnish team had two separate community days, during which the whole office and mechanics were splitted in two different groups.
The first group helped the Sipoo community to collect organic waste from a field area nearby the residential neighborhood of Talma. Team PNO Finland helped collect dead branches to a dumpster place, as well as remove Spanish Slug (Ariona Vulgaris) – an invasive species that kills any green plant it gets in contact with. Due to its high spreading speed, the Spanish Slug has already ruined a considerable amount of green areas in Southern Finland and is expected to be a significant problem in the future. This time our team managed to collect around 400 eggs.
The second group helped the Sipoo community to plant trees in a new industrial area in Söderkulla. The trees had to be planted next to a new noise barrier – 4m high and about 200m long – constructed besides the highway. To cover the area, Team PNO alone planted a total of 450 trees. This task would have normally taken a week to get done by Sipoo Municipality workers, but our team of 8 people could make it possible in only one day.
PNO Group – Cleaning up Copenhagen’s water and more
Due to the impossibility of organizing a team event, PNO Group decided to leave each employee, or small groups of employees, free to organize their own volunteering activities.
Team members from our Group Office spent some of their 15 hours collecting trash from the canals of Copenhagen on board of a green kayak. The NGO Green Kayak is a global initiative with locations across 5 countries. They offer everyone to borrow a kayak and paddle for free. Kayakers pay by using their time to clean up trash.
Other employees from our Copenhagen office made use of their volunteering hours by celebrating the World Cleanup Day collecting garbage with the family; as well as contributing with leftover paint and supplies to Paint It Forward, a recycling project to help citizens and artists in Amager neighborhood, while saving the environment.
Furthermore, a team member of PNO Group donated hours to Cykling Uden Alder (Cycling Without Age), a not-for-profit charity that provides a community service by connecting those no longer able to ride for themselves with their community and the outdoors by giving them free rides on trishaw ebikes, piloted by volunteer cyclists.
PNO Denmark – Tidying up a green area in Horsens
Team PNO Denmark supported Horses’ local community to clean a green area nearby Nørrestrand. Our team had to cut grass up to 50 cm high, pruning trees, as well as removing trees in order to make the area suitable to be utilized by the local community – such as schools and kindergartens around the area.
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