Kraft Foods‘ employees have created their own grassroots sustainability projects in offices and manufacturing facilities around the world. All-volunteer Kraft Foods «Green Teams» and Cadbury «Green Advocates» are taking steps to integrate sustainability into their daily work. And they’re inspiring colleagues to work together and do their part to build a better world.

Kraft Foods has done the basics at many facilities around the world — like trading individual printers for more efficient, shared devices, adding recycling bins and replacing disposable kitchenware with reusable items. Following are several examples of employees’ creative spirit delivering results:

Brazil: 25 employees joined the local «Live Earth Run for Water» race — a 4 mile (6 km) run representing the average distance women and children in developing countries walk each day to get water.

Canada: Employees created an organic garden to grow their own vegetables to share with family, friends and even the office cafeteria. Green Teams helped the office collect food scraps and coffee grounds for composting — reducing the amount of waste going to landfills. And they even started a free employee shuttle program to encourage public transit use, increasing ridership 150 percent in one year.

United Kingdom: Employees launched «Green Soul» in 2007 — promoting recycling drives, a bike to work week and giveaways of free energy saving light bulbs and water saving devices.

The USA: Employees created an online system for sharing and reusing idle plant equipment around the world — repurposing 360 machines in 2009, helping keep equipment out of landfills, saving money and energy that would be used to build new machines. Green Advocates created Sustainability Awareness Week, featuring a «working smarter day» on video conferencing, a «black and white day» on smarter printing, and «green day» on energy saving practices at work.