EFL to complete planting 14,000 trees in 2019
Expolanka Freight (EFL), a global freight forwarding company headquartered in Sri Lanka, continues to embark on a sustainability journey focusing on the environment and has successfully completed the planting of 12,000 trees.
This year, the company intends to complete planting 2,000 additional trees. This timely initiative coincides with 2019’s ‘Air pollution’ theme for World Environment Day. To commemorate this special day, EFL pledges to take responsibility to minimise their in-house business operational emissions and work collectively to save the planet.
While the main aim of this project is to mitigate air pollution, it also serves a dual purpose to protect bio-diversity, wildlife and local communities. Sri Lanka has continuously witnessed rising numbers in both human and elephant deaths due to the humanelephant conflict. Sadly, each year, at least 70 humans lose their lives and 300 elephants are killed.
Some of the main issues surrounding this fateful crisis include a reduction in forest areas, inadequacy of land areas to sustain the livelihood of elephants, and local communities moving into marshy land for agricultural purposes
and depriving elephants of their food supply in their natural habitat.
As a resolution to this ongoing crisis, EFL worked closely with the CEO of Citigardens to curate an innovative idea to protect both the local communities and the elephants.
To transform this idea into an actionable project, EFL together with Citigardens partnered with the Dambulla Municipal Council and allocated a space in this world heritage city to carry out the tree planting initiative.
The project will focus on cultivating trees in rows following a zig-zag pattern between communal areas and elephant prevalent zones. This will act as a deterrent from elephants passing through to the communal areas in concern.
“As a freight forwarding company, we understand that indirect carbon emissions occur as part of our dayto-day business operations. For the past three years, we have taken responsibility and planted a total of 12,000 trees and we intend to plant 2,000 more trees to mitigate emissions this year. With this new initiative focusing on combating air pollution, we look forward to transforming ourselves further, into a socially responsible organization,” EFL Sustainability Lead Sabrina Yusoof stated.
With an aim to successfully carry out efforts to save the environment, this ongoing project will also encourage EFL employees to partake in tree planting initiatives to not only understand the importance of going green, but to evolve into human beings that follow an eco-conscious journey, within their respective work environments as well as the communities they operate in.
EFL is a member of Expolanka PLC a leading conglomerate with interests in logistics, leisure and investments. The company has thrived on overcoming the challenges of operating in limited logistic infrastructure markets, taking its operations to 18 countries, over 60 offices and over 2,300 staff around the world.