An hour for the Earth: SM City Cebu turns off lights to support global Earth Hour

Well-aware of their big impact to their immediate community especially their development’s effects to the environment, the country’s biggest retail conglomerate SM Supermalls participated in the environmental advocacy called as the “Earth Hour” last Saturday at exactly 8:00 o’clock in the evening turning off 50 percent of their electrical and lighting facilities including their logo, dropdown billboard, pylon tower, landscape and signage.

Earth Hour is a global movement promoted by the World Wide Fund (WWF), an environmental lobby group, which is a highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their carbon emissions on an ongoing basis to help lessen the negative effects of global warming.

Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message to the world about the need for immediate action on global warming and lobbyists point out that this advocacy is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference — from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.

The first Earth Hour event was held in Sydney last March 31, 2007 wherein about 2.2 million people and 2, 100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour.

In their webpage, the Earth Hour organization posted that for last Saturday’s event, they were able to cover 24 cities around the world and signed-up more than 20,280 businesses and 293,440 individuals worldwide.

And these included SM City Cebu wherein all of their more than 700 tenants joined in turning off their unused lighting and electrical facilities for an hour.

In a phone interview with SM City Cebu’s Mall Manager Sherry Tuvilla, she shared that SM’s daily average electric consumption reaches about 70,000 kilowatt hours. And during their participation on the Earth Hour, they were able to save 25 percent of their total consumption or saving 2.5 percent of the total consumption on a daily basis.

“Earth Hour advocates the conservation of energy and we joined because we always support environmental projects as part of our corporate social responsibility. Since we are increasing by having more malls, we have impact in the environment so we are finding more ways to be supportive to also give back to our environment,” said Tuvilla.

After Earth Hour, she said that SM’s wide network will be finding more ways through research on other means to help in the advocacy of conserving our environment based on the Philippines’ set-up.

“In a progressive set-up, there will always be huge possibilities that we would be sacrificing our environment especially if all we will consider is generating profit, so this is our way of initiating a long term commitment to help preserve the environment,” she added.

Before their participation on the Earth Hour, SM Supermalls have already started green advocacy programs such as their “Waste Market Fair” held every first Saturdays of the month which encourages households to earn profit through properly segregating and recycling their garbage. They also started advocating the so-called “Green Bag” campaign which persuades customers to use an alternative “green bag” rather than the usual plastic bags they use to carry their purchased goods to lessen the use of environmentally-toxic plastics. – Rhia de Pablo/NLQ