17. May 2022
Franziska Krenz
Julia is the “Product Owner” of our VAST GREEN project and passionate about sustainability even beyond her job.
In order to share her daily inspiration and research results with the whole VAST FORWARD team, Julia launched the weekly “Sustainable Friday” series in November 2021 – which has now become a source of inspiration for all of us. Ever-changing topics related to the way we live bring up surprising, sometimes very simple hacks that help us make our everyday lives even more sustainable.
The varying “Sustainable Friday” topics are shared during our weekly virtual coworking, where all VAST GREEN working groups come together.
What Julia started as a small internal presentation series is now shared by the whole VAST FORWARD team. In short presentations, we concentrate on different sustainability related topics, which always lead to lively conversations and discussions within the team. The Sustainable Friday is no longer just an internal project. For some time now, we have been sharing it every Friday on our Instagram channel and from now on you can also find the entire Sustainable Friday presentations on our VAST-GREEN website.
Julia held the first Sustainable Friday in November 2021, on Black Friday, under the headline “Black Friday – A bad day for sustainability”, where she inspired us to question our personal consumption behaviors and showed how retail companies advertise supposed bargains.
The contribution surrounding the topic of the global cocoa industry in December led to one or the other VAST FORWARD team member lingering a little longer in front of the chocolate shelf in the supermarket. Julia impressively pointed out why the cocoa industry is repeatedly criticized by human rights and environmental organizations and which labels supporting sustainable cocoa cultivation we can trust.
Jenny gave us an insight into the global Slow Food movement, which promotes a socially and ecologically responsible food system to protect biodiversity and animal welfare.
Franzi was tired of having to buy dishwasher tabs wrapped in plastic packaging and shared her research on sustainable household remedies. Conventional cleaning products are basically unnecessary – by using simple home remedies, we can not only save the environment and minimize our plastic consumption but also save money at the same time – a real win-win situation.
Vanessa’s presentation on second-hand and vintage stores started with lots of good reasons to buy second hand – again, you can save money and more importantly resources, as the production of clothing is very water intensive. It ended in an extremely lively exchange about our personal second-hand treasures and created new ideas for a blogpost series – stay tuned!
Also socio-political topics, like mindful media consumption, which are especially important in difficult times, like the Corona Pandemic or the war in Ukraine, are on our minds for the Sustainable Friday and show how we can cope with the daily news consumption.
The Sustainable Friday stimulates discussions and lets us once again think outside our own box.
The team does an incredible job, researching and presenting the results to each other. The Sustainable Friday stimulates discussions and lets us once again think outside our own box. Sometimes it’s about seemingly mundane things, other times about highly explosive ones.
But in all topics we are united: We want to act and live more sustainably as a company and as private individuals – and each of us has our personal “specialty” in this pursuit…our Sustainable Friday is a weekly source of inspiration for us and hopefully for our followers.
