Month: May 2024

Every April, people around the world celebrate Earth Month to demonstrate support for environmental protection and more sustainable practices. At Chemours, we strive to be environmental leaders every day and our teams embraced the spirit of Earth Month by hosting impactful activities around the globe.

Our Earth Month festivities were headlined by an event at our Chambers Works site in New Jersey where we reaffirmed our commitment to renewing habitats and fostering biodiversity at our sites. On April 18, the Chambers Works team hosted a hybrid education session led by Amber Wellman, our Chief Sustainability Officer, and the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) followed by onsite, nature-based activities. Over forty employees contributed to more than 100 volunteer hours during the event, planting native trees, transplanting several native plants, beautifying an existing pollinator garden, and building and refurbishing bug hotels.

At our Parlin site in New Jersey, team members collected hundreds of pounds of trash at Old Bridge Waterfront Park—a popular local beach where many community members love to fish, and watch birds, whales, and boats traversing Raritan Bay. The beach has a lot of history as well. In fact, the shark hunts at this beach inspired the move “Jaws!”

Meanwhile, our teams in West Virginia celebrated Earth Day by making an impact in their communities.

Our Belle site sponsored a booth at The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and Clay Center’s annual Earth Day celebration. During the event, site employees engaged with several elementary school classes who learned about ways to reduce plastic waste. And at Chemours’ Washington Works site, the team cleaned up and made many important upgrades to their Nature Trail, including improved erosion control and completing the split rail entrance to the main trail. In addition, the site’s PRIDE employee resource group (ERG) planted milkweed plants across 20 acres of land adjacent to the site.

Chemours team members at our Louisville, Kentucky and Fayetteville, North Carolina sites were also busy this Earth Day. The Louisville team partnered with Farnsley Middle School, to clean up the school’s campus which was led by the school’s Environmental Club, allowing Chemours employees to work alongside students, administrators, and teachers to clean up Farnsley’s outdoor classroom space in advance of enhancing this learning space for students next year.

The Fayetteville Works site hosted a wildlife habitat improvement event focused on revitalizing one of the site’s walking trails. They also spruced up a pollinator garden, cleaned up Highway 87 (the road along the site’s entrance), and installed birdhouses.

Chemours Earth Month efforts were truly global with activities at sites in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

In Monterrey, Mexico, Chemours employees commemorated Earth Day by planting lemon, plum, and orange trees. They also built a vegetable garden at the site where they planted cilantro, carrots, pumpkins, tomatoes, jalapeño peppers, and lettuce.

The Dordrecht Works team in the Netherlands participated in several activities. Sixty colleagues worked together to clean up the Dordrecht site and employees set up insect hotels to promote biodiversity and attract more insects that can pollinate the cross trees the team planted in 2023.

Our Changshu site hosted several activities to celebrate Earth Day. They worked together with volunteers to build a garden in the corner of the site’s wilderness area, where they planted vegetables, including cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, loofahs, watermelon, and muskmelon and welcomed everyone to bring flowers to the garden for planting. The team also organized a mountain cleanup and hike, encouraging family members to join and promote environmental protection.

These are just some of the examples of how Chemours employees took action during Earth Month and made a positive difference at our sites and in our communities. We have a vested interest in ensuring and enhancing the vibrancy of our local communities globally, and each step and action we take counts. While Earth Month celebrations may be over, our commitment to responsible manufacturing and spirit of environmental stewardship remain strong at Chemours year-round.

Can you tell a deer tick from a black-legged tick? What about the lone star tick from the dog tick?

Students from Pontiac Township High School in central Illinois are learning to identify them all, and their research is contributing to regional public health information available on tick-borne diseases.

The tick project is one of many initiatives with impact undertaken by the students. They’ve also planted 20 acres of native plants, tracked monarch butterfly populations and feeding patterns, and re-established a species of reptile that had been extirpated from the state.

“There are very few kids in the state who are able to do this kind of learning in a non-traditional setting,” says Paul Ritter, a science instructor at the Pontiac, IL-based high school.

“And why are we able to do this? Because we have the land.”

In 2021, Enbridge donated 20 acres of prairie property to Operation Endangered Species (OES), a program founded in 2011 by Ritter who also serves as the non-profit organization’s executive director.

Every year on April 22, the world marks Earth Day, an annual celebration of environmental protection around the globe. At Enbridge, sustainability is central to everything we do, and we also support community sustainability projects that help improve, grow and nurture our environment.

Kickapoo Prairie, named by the students for the Indigenous Tribe that lived longest in the region, is located in Cayuga, IL, just a five-minute drive from the school. It serves as a classroom for multiple disciplines—biology, physics, English, history, math, engineering.

“When I say it’s a living laboratory, that’s 100% what it is,” Ritter explains. “You can look at it as a piece of property, or you can look at it as a changer of lives.”

In 2023, the students worked with the school superintendent to design an outdoor learning center at the prairie. Another project in development is a communications tower that will deliver free broadband internet to Pontiac High students, ensuring every student has access to high-speed internet at home to support their learning.

“If we didn’t have this property, none of this would have happened,” Ritter says. “The reality is, giving the kids the tools to make these things happen is what makes real change take place—not just in this ecosystem, but within themselves. This is what carries them on into the future.”

The students’ long-term goal, passed down from year to year, is to return the entire 20 acres to their natural prairie habitat. Though Illinois is known as the Prairie State, less than 0.01% of the state’s original 21 million acres of prairie remain, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

In 2023, students planted hundreds of thousands of native plant seeds to give nature a helping hand.

In this project and others, Ritter and the students work with the Odawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomi communities, who have lived on the land for thousands of years. Indigenous cultural leaders visit the school and the prairie where everyone works together and shares culture, adding another level of depth and meaning to the restoration work.

Cal Hackler, a science instructor at the high school, says the learning experience the prairie supports “is incomparable to any other experiences they’ve had from an academic standpoint.”

Adds Hackler: “The prairie is the catalyst. When kids come up with ideas, we give them the tools to do it. You can’t hold them back. They want to do, and this space lets them do.”

One student sent Hackler and Ritter a thank-you letter describing the prairie’s impact on her life. She says her self-confidence has increased, and she recognizes that every mistake is a chance to work harder and grow.

Working on the prairie, the student sees what is possible, and what can be created, Hackler says.

“And that is the pinnacle of learning—creating.”