At Voltus, we dedicate ourselves daily to the hard work of making our energy systems more efficient, fair, clean, and economical for people, planet, and profits. We evangelize our business proposition of “less energy, more cash” and our triple bottom line – a win for our customers, a win for Voltus, and a win for the environment. This type of competitive teamwork for a positive result is what we call “Voltan-teering”, the bright, gritty, goodness that unifies us outside of our daily work. Whether it’s planting trees in Maryland, a beach clean-up in San Diego, or beautifying the local community in Pittsburgh one thing is clear- our team goes above and beyond to make an impact in our communities and live our values in our daily lives.

We meet three times a year at an event known as VoltusFest to strategize and optimize. Our most recent VoltusFest a few weeks ago was held in Pittsburgh, a perfect backdrop for our team to learn, grow, and “Voltan-teer”. We challenged ourselves to not only to make our conference as green as possible, but also to do some service and leave the city cleaner than how we found it. At the start of the week everyone was given reusable utensils and a Contigo thermos. Our plateware was compostable or recyclable and we monitored our daily waste sent to the landfill. Despite our best efforts we still generated many bags of trash and recycling every day.

But our team had a plan in mind. To offset the impact of our unavoidable waste we’d challenge teams of Voltans to achieve negative waste by picking up more than they had thrown out over the week- our “Negawaste Challenge”. The service component challenged Voltans in teams of 7 to venture out across Pittsburgh’s North Side, North Shore, and Downtown to pick up as much litter as possible in 2 hours. Teams did a rapid cleanup around The National Aviary, Heinz Field, David L Lawrence Convention center, and other heavily-trafficked areas. When the final scores were tallied a team was crowned victorious but the real victory was in collecting more waste than had been created during the week.

We invite you to join us on this journey – start your own negawaste challenge, find other ways to impact the triple bottom line, and mobilize your friends, co-workers, and family to join you and us in taking action.

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