smartwith heart
Who needs pizza when you can have dirty water?
Dylan Huizing - April 2
People have different tastes. Some people think pineapple on pizza is acceptable. Some, like my wife, even hate pizza. So, mostly, I have pizza only when there’s a pizza party at work. But recently, I learned that there’s something even better than any pizza party: cleaning up rivers!
On March 19th, OMP hosted its first Cleanup Day! OMP’s Corporate Social Responsibility team called for volunteers to get together to clean up local waterways, a cool initiative for our first official collaboration with River Cleanup. I’m the sort of person who picks up litter when I walk our dog so, of course, I was in!
River Cleanup
River Cleanup is an international nonprofit focusing on – you guessed it – cleaning up rivers. No surprises there. But here’s something on their website that really did surprise me:
“80% of plastic that ends up in the ocean, comes from around 1000 rivers. Most pollution ends up in nature through small urban rivers (Meijer et al, 2021).”
Apparently, fighting this plastic soup could be as easy as heading out to our nearest river! So we were more than happy to team up for OMP’s first Cleanup Day.
OMP Cleanup Day
Blog post
55 colleagues signed up. It was great to see a mix of colleagues I wouldn’t normally meet: from database experts to project managers, implementation consultants to technical writers, as well as software developers and legal administrators.
We carpooled and biked to the Albert Canal, where we got our briefing from River Cleanup and cleaned for two hours, or 110 person hours, resulting in about 273kg of trash pulled from the riverside and roadside. The math is a bit of a challenge here, but this should amount to around 185,640 grateful fish.
All jokes aside, it was really nice to get together to do something unambiguously meaningful. It felt great to see another side of my colleagues and for us to make an immediate impact together.
When we returned to HQ, the day wouldn’t have been complete without a little celebration, co-hosted by River Cleanup. Because doing something good for the world doesn’t mean you can’t have fun doing it! And, as it turned out, this dirty water get-together was better than just some pizza party. It was really nice and it felt rewarding to celebrate doing something for nature, and even better to be celebrating it alongside other colleagues who care about our corporate social responsibility towards our environment.
Blog post
Corporate Social Responsibility
Of course, we would never just clean up a river for a couple of hours and call it a day. This is only a small part of our new Corporate Social Responsibility journey. While it’s nice to help clean a river - especially because, for every hour of our own time we put in to a CSR project, OMP pledges two more – the core strength of what we do lies in intelligent solutions.
Our skills solving complex problems, organizing information, building smart systems, and helping teams collaborate are exactly what many nonprofit organizations desperately need but can’t afford to access. We’re already offering these skills to several nonprofit organizations, and I’m excited to see how we further broaden our approach in the near future. But in the meantime, when there’s another event where we can all get together and make an immediate impact, you can count on me being there.
Dylan Huizing
Senior Technical Writer
Biography
Dylan Huizing is a Senior Technical Writer for OMP's Supply Planning team. With a PhD in mathematical optimization algorithms, he discovered his passion for teaching and writing about these complex concepts. In his current role, Dylan creates documentation and training materials for OMP solvers and various supply planning functionalities. As the product owner of Supply Planning documentation, he is dedicated to the challenge of ensuring that OMP provides timely, comprehensive, and user-friendly documentation.
