During the Take It Up campaign, we’ll be posting about our workplace activities to inspire businesses and groups who are taking it up with us. Each week we’ll sharing our events with you and include resources you can use with your groups!

This week we tested Earth Day Canada staff about toxins in their everyday personal care products…

Toxin awareness might seem like a daunting task. How do we get people to actually read the labels and understand what is okay and what’s bad for us and the earth with all these long weird words (sodium laurel sulphate = good or bad)?

This is how we tackled it.

1. We started by nominating a leader of our Take It Up team to plan a “trivia challenge game show” to engage staff. The leader decided what to use from the Detox your personal care routine action and added any additional resources. We kept two things in mind: keep it short and keep it interesting.
2. We booked a room in advance and e-mailed the resources* out to the office (or Take It Up group) for staff to check out whenever they had time or needed a short break.
3. Drawing from the resources, the team leader developed the detox trivia challenge and told staff to study if they wanted to win!
4. We based the game on a popular game show format and planned it to be fast-paced so people didn’t lose interest. (Providing prizes can help with that too!) Also, since it’s hard to get everyone away from work, we kept it short (less than 15 minutes) so everyone could play.

E-mail us at campaigns@earthday.ca and we’ll send you the game in the form of a slideshow along with the answer key for you to use with your group!

Next week we’re bringing our water wise activity to you!

* Here’re the resources we shared with staff to prep for the challenge:
Detox Your Personal Care Routine
The Story of Cosmetics
What you need to know about toxics in your cosmetic products
‘Dirty Dozen’ cosmetic chemicals to avoid