Goldenvoice’s Coachella Music and Arts Festival has phased out single-use plastic straws, making it the first festival in the world to align with Lonely Whale’s ‘For A Strawless Ocean,’ an open-source guide to reduce plastic pollution. According to Lonely Whale, across the United States, nearly 500 million plastic straws are used and tossed each day, amounting to approximately 12 million pounds of plastic waste year.

This Earth Day, we asked Coulter Wood, a senior staff engineer at Hormel Foods who is responsible for the company’s energy management, to share some of his favorite tips — things people can do in their own lives to help preserve the Earth’s resources. Check out his thoughts and learn more about Coulter and his role at the company below!

Major metropolitan office markets across the globe are seeing a significant increase in the adoption of “green” building certification programs, according to the inaugural International Green Building Adoption Index (IGBAI) – a study by CBRE and Maastricht University (Netherlands). The study reports that 18.6 percent of space in 10 markets across Australia, Canada and Europe is now certified “green” versus just 6.4 percent in 2007.

JetBlue is helping to preserve nearly 500,000 acres of Brazilian Rainforest. Often called the Lungs of the Planet, the project is preserving land that is host to rare and highly endangered eco systems, which support over 30,000 types of plants, and wildlife, including howler monkeys, fresh water dolphins and scarlet macaws. The projects help local communities too, making forest preservation economically viable.

Katharine Wilkinson, Senior Writer for Drawdown, joins us as this week's guest blogger. April 18th marked the one-year anniversary of the publication of Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, and pull for the book’s message only continues to grow. It is a great joy to be something of an itinerant preacher these days—roaming from town to town, conference to campus to company, sharing this blueprint of possibility.

In celebration of the spring TOYOTA OWNERS 400 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup race, Smithfield Foods, Inc., and Kroger joined forces at Richmond Raceway over the weekend to donate more than 40,000 pounds of protein to FeedMore, Central Virginia’s core hunger-relief organization. Assisting with the donation was Aric Almirola, driver of the No. 10 Smithfield Ford Fusion for Stewart-Haas Racing in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.

Smithfield’s contribution is part of the company’s 2018 Helping Hungry Homes® tour. Now in the program’s 10th year, Helping Hungry Homes® is Smithfield’s signature hunger-relief initiative focused on alleviating hunger and helping Americans become more food secure.

Embracing gender equality in the workforce has benefits for retention, supply chains, and other benefits accoridng to case studies by the World Economic Forum.

Today, we reached an historic milestone on Comcast Cares Day – more than one million volunteers have joined in service to improve their communities around the world since 2001. Comcast NBCUniversal employees and their families, friends, and community partners participated in the 17th annual Comcast Cares Day, the nation’s largest single-day corporate volunteer effort and a powerful representation of the company’s year-round commitment to community service. What started with 6,100 volunteers in 2001 in one city has now grown to more than 100,000 volunteers this year at over 1,000 sites in about 20 countries.