Community Updates

Bank of America kicks off global recycling campaign - 8-foot sculpture unveiled as inspiration for employees

In honor of Earth Day, employees from Bank of America’s Plano campus joined Mayor Harry LaRosiliere to help raise awareness about workplace waste reduction and recycling on Wednesday.The event launched the bank’s Recycle Now campaign, which includes a six-week global employee recycling challenge and aims to educate and inspire employees to recycle at work as part of Bank of America’s commitment to reduce its environmental footprint and accelerate a low-carbon economy.To kick-start the inspiration, LaRosiliere unveiled an 8-foot sculpture made entirely from recyclable materials, which will be displayed near the corporate campus’ cafeteria to remind employees to recycle.

Published 9 years ago | About a 3 minute read

To kick-start the inspiration, LaRosiliere unveiled an 8-foot sculpture made entirely from recyclable materials, which will be displayed near the corporate campus’ cafeteria to remind employees to recycle.

“We are inspired by the partnership we have with Bank of America for being a leader in sustainability,” he said. “Bank of America is not in Plano; they’re part of Plano. This is why we’re the ‘City of Excellence’ – for the corporate partnership and working together of organizations.”

Competing with Bank of America offices in Boston, Charlotte, London and New York, the North Texas office partnered with the Big Thought Institute and local artist Kijana Martin, who spent about three months creating the “Each One, Teach One” sculpture.

“This has been a very interesting process for me as an artist, a citizen and a person,” Martin said. “When I embarked on ‘Each One, Teach One,’ I didn’t know a lot about recycling, but when I learned about the impact that we all have by leaving our trail of trash – our hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash that we leave each year – it touched me.”

“Each One, Teach One” portrays an adult leading a child in Martin’s effort to show adults what they can teach their children to make a difference.

“It’s important to me that it continues to be a reminder of the impact that we can have by teaching our children,” she said. “I hope when they walk past, they think of their child and how they can impact the future. We have the opportunity to teach our children.”

Martin said made the sculpture’s outer layer from about six or seven car-loads of Styrofoam that she melted down to create a polymer.

“It was actually very stringy and pliable. It cures over time and becomes a very hard plastic all over again,” she said, explaining that Styrofoam takes about 500 years to break down. “We have an opportunity to use Styrofoam in different ways if we just understand how to break it down and do other things with it.”

The sculpture’s base layer is comprised of about 400 bottles of Sprite, Mountain Dew and 7-Up cut to resemble grass. Martin also used aluminum cans and mailers.

Jeff Davis, Bank of America’s global technology and operations Plano site executive, said the Recycle Now campaign ends June 5 on World Environment Day. The bank market that recycles the most will receive a $25,000 grant for a local environmental nonprofit in its area. The market that improves its recycling rate the most will receive a $10,000 grant to the nonprofit.

“As we embark on this challenge over the next six weeks, I want to encourage everyone and challenge you to take the extra steps to recycle,” Davis said. “We have the power to make a difference and have a positive impact on our environment and our generation.”