Eco-Friendly

We are Celebrating the 41st World Environment Day

World Environment Day is back again! It’s a great reason to celebrate our world and participate in positive environmental action…but what exactly is it?

World Environment Day was first celebrated 41 years ago at the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The conference began on June 5th, 1972, and is considered a breakthrough event in the development of international environmentalism. It opened up international dialogue on human interactions with the environment, which had not been addressed on the global scale before.

The conference helped build a framework for governments and international organizations to deal with environmental issues, current and future. Today, the UNEP uses June 5th to continue the tradition of education and discussion around international environmental problems. Each year there is a new theme and a new country acts as the official World Environment Day host.

This year, Mongolia is the hosting country and the theme is “Think.Eat.Save”. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 1.3 billion tones of food are wasted every year and 1 in 7 people go to bed hungry every day.

The take-home message: by wasting less food, more of the world’s food resources can be allotted to the hungry, instead of ending up in a landfill.

People across the globe are celebrating. Some are hosting environmental documentary screenings in Moscow, Russia while others are leading public awareness campaigns in Thailand.  Elementary school student are holding rallies in Kathmandu, Nepal, and people across the globe are pledging to waste less food in their own homes.

In the spirit of the Think.Eat.Save theme, Clean Currents staff members have started volunteering with DC Central Kitchen, chopping produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. DC Central Kitchen gets most of its food from farms and food distributors that donate their misshapen and blemished foods to the organization. Most of the food preparation is done through DC Central Kitchen’s culinary training program for unemployed men and women who want to replace homelessness, addiction, and incarceration with new careers and changed lives.

In addition to taking our own actions, we are working to get the word out about World Environment Day throughout the communities that we serve. Let us know what you are doing for World Environment day this year by writing on our Facebook Page.