Zappos is composting! It’s true; we have partnered with A1 Organics to collect and compost the food scraps and paper products that are generated in the Z-Bistro. For the last few months, we have been testing the compost collection system inside the kitchen where food scraps from daily prep are separated and collected for composting. Recently, we extended the reach of the collection to include the leftover food scraps, napkins, and paper plates from the dining room. More than 1,000 meals are served a day - this makes for a lot of scraps!

Just to be clear, we are not composting on-site since we don’t have a worm farm out back (but how cool would that be!). Rather, we are sending our compostable materials to A1’s facility north of Las Vegas. A1 has over 50 acres of land dedicated to making 24,000 tons of mulch and compost a year from the food scraps collected from Zappos, supermarkets and Strip casinos, and green waste from many local landscaping companies and golf courses. After 90 days of processing, the mulch and compost returns to the city and is sold at local nurseries – a great life cycle story.

In typical Zappos style, we had a party to celebrate our composting initiative. The day-long “compost party” featured education from LEAF and A1 Organics and muddy cup treats from the Z-Bistro kitchen team. Mmm, tasty!

As part of LEAF’s initiative to make Zappos a more environmentally friendly workplace, we hosted an Earth Day event for our employees on Tuesday, April 17th. We asked several local and non-local vendors to participate by spreading awareness about how easy and fun it is to become eco-friendly, and wow, did our vendors surely step up to the plate! Earth Day was such a success that we’ve decided to make this an annual event with the goal to make each year even better than the previous!

When we first reached out to our vendors, their responses were overwhelming! They were thrilled to hear the Zappos was starting its journey to become environmentally friendly, and they were even more excited to be a part of it. The vendors that attended our event included: KEEN, prAna, Patagonia, Whole Foods, Vegas Roots Community Gardens, Lunas Recycling, Sierra Nevada, BottleHood, Springs Preserve, Friends of Nevada Wilderness, Southwest Gas, and RTC.

prAna did something special for all Zappos employees that deserves a special shout out. Not only did they showcase their use of sustainable materials in their products, demonstrated how they’ve eliminated poly bags in their warehouse, and discussed their initiatives with clean energy; they surprised us by offsetting all of our Las Vegas employees’ carbon emissions! This means that 1,300 of us will be carbon neutral for the entire month of April!* Thank you prAna for caring so much about the environment and truly WOWing all of us!

Not all of our Earth Day vendors could make a physical appearance at Zappos HQ. However, they still showed their support for our event and sent out information about their eco-friendly products and sustainable initiatives, prizes for us to raffle off, and even coupons specifically made for our employees. These vendors included: ChicoBags, EcoLunchBoxes, Klean Kanteen, Semilla, People Towels, Vessel Drinkware, and Haiku Bags. 

One of our goals for our first annual Zappos Earth Day was to promote an eco-friendly change in the daily habits of at least one employee. With the help of our vendors that provided and demonstrated eco-friendly options and initiatives to our employees, I believe the event successfully achieved its goal! The immense turnout of curious Zappos employees also helped promote more green awareness. We really could not have pulled this event off without the help of all of our amazing vendors –THANK YOU!

That being said, it is my personal goal to make next year’s Zappos Earth Day even more successful!

*1,300 individual offsets would be the same as 117 cars removed from the road for a year, or carbon sequestered by 128 acres of trees, or removing the harmful effects from extracting 1392 barrels of oil.