What Earth Day means to us.

Here at Sam’s Xpress®, we LOVE Earth Day! Why? Because Earth Day is a great reminder of how important it is for everyone to commit to environmental conservation, one of our biggest priorities. Earth Day is celebrated annually on April 22nd, and related events are held in over 193 countries worldwide! Earth Day Network helps to coordinate these events globally.

We attended an event to celebrate Earth Day nearby our University location at UNCC on Wednesday April 20th. Tons of students and faculty visited us at the Earth Day Festival for some free giveaways and a chance to win some free car washes! We have also been sharing easy conservation ideas on our social media pages leading up to and will continue during Earth Day, today. Make sure to follow us to keep up with our helpful tips plus all of our exciting contests and giveaways!

We were also able to celebrate Earth Day in a big way with one of our fellow Earth Day Festival attendees, Sustain Charlotte, by attending their 2016 Sustain Charlotte Awards last night! We were honored to attend as one of four nominees for their Water category award and thrilled to share our sustainability story with nominees and attendees of this great event. Congratulations to the Catawba River Keepers on winning this award and their continued commitment to water conservation! You can find more info about Sustain Charlotte, award nominations, and the event here: http://www.sustaincharlotte.org/2016nominees

To get everyone else as excited about Earth Day & conservation as we are, we are sharing some of our favorite (and simple!) ways to go green on Earth Day and every day! These tips from goodhousekeeping.com are sure to come in handy for you, both as a way to easily help our environment and save money while doing it! 

In the Morning

Green "to go." Not brewing at home? Take a travel cup to your favorite coffee shop; they may fill it at a discount.

At Work

Double up. Configure your office printer or copy machine so it prints on both sides of the page.
Put it to sleep. If you'll be away from your computer for more than 20 minutes, change it to "sleep" mode.

Running Errands

BYOB. Bags, that is. It's good for your wallet, too: Some retailers, such as CVS, now pay you for every disposable bag you don't take ($1 on a special CVS card for every four trips on which you BYO) (Target gives a 5 cent discount per bag!).

Before Bed

Truly turn off electronics. Plug your devices — the TV and DVD player, or the computer and printer — into a UL-certified power strip; switch the whole group off for the evening to prevent phantom electrical draw.
Don't tap out. Turn off the water while brushing teeth. Leaving the tap running during the recommended two minutes of brushing can waste up to five gallons of water a day.

Of course, we recommend visiting a Sam’s Xpress location (you can see all of our locations here: http://samsxpresscarwash.com/locations/) each and every time you wash your car! We not only save you time, effort, and funds spent on water bills, but also potentially hundreds of gallons of water, compared to washing at home. Sam’s Xpress Car Wash is continually making improvements to better the environment and your car washing experience. Our top-notch equipment allows us to recycle 100% of the water used and reuse 90% of what is recycled. Each car wash site saves about 12 million gallons of fresh water per year. All of our chemicals are environmentally friendly and biodegradable, making the entire car wash experience eco-friendly. From saving energy through the works of the car wash to our energy saving dryers in the bathroom facilities, Sam’s Xpress® is determined to keep our environment safe and clean!

We hope you will help us celebrate Earth Day this year by visiting us for an environmentally friendly car wash and choosing a new way you can help the environment.

Adopt-A-Stream - Just One of the Ways Sam's Xpress® Conserves Water!

You may know that Sam’s Xpress® is dedicated to water conservation and participates in the Water Savers Program at all of our car wash locations, but did you know that we dedicate ourselves to helping with other local water saving efforts, too? One of the ways which we have chosen to help locally is by volunteering with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Adopt-A-Stream program. We have been volunteering our time and resources to help keep Four-9 stream in Matthews, North Carolina, a safe and clean place for animals, people, and the environment for the past three years!

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Adopt-A-Stream program is a great way for any group to give back and become active in the community. Scheduling a clean-up is easy and participating in this program helps keep the over 2,000 miles of streams in Mecklenburg County clean and beautiful. Who doesn’t love a clean community? By having volunteer groups, like our employees, in and around the streams, the county can also more easily stay abreast of water pollution and other problems affecting water quality and the overall environment.

This opportunity, which is just one of the programs provided by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, even provides volunteers with hip waders, litter grabbers, gloves, and trash bags! Supplies for up to ten volunteers are available to those groups who schedule ahead of time and request these items.

Participation in this program allows us to further commit to two of our biggest priorities: conserving water and giving back to our local communities, by helping to rid local streams of litter and debris. Employees from our various locations and our corporate staff (including our own COO!) volunteer their time twice a year to help keep our community waterways clean. We love the chance to get together as a team to provide a service for the community and spend some time together outside of the offices and car wash sites. Small groups of around 8 Sam’s Xpress employees suit up in the hip waders provided by the Adopt-A-Stream Program and commit to cleaning sections of our designated stream. Through our efforts, we are typically able to remove several garbage bags full of refuse and/or large items found in and around the stream. Through the commitment of groups like us, around 130 stream clean ups removing more than 9 tons of garbage, were completed in Mecklenburg County over the past year! This means preservation of one our most precious natural resources and good feelings all around! We will be continuing our efforts as we grow into new markets, such as our expansion to the Raleigh, NC area later this year. You can find more information here: www.samsxpresscarwash.com/news

Reference:

http://charmeck.org/stormwater/VolunteerGetInvolved/Pages/Adopt-A-StreamProgram.aspx, http://charmeck.org/stormwater/VolunteerGetInvolved/Pages/default.aspx https://www.facebook.com/waterwatchers/