OREANDA-NEWS. On March 31, the Citadele Bank will be taking part in the global Earth Hour activity. The facade lighting of the bank’s headquarters will be switched off at 8:30 PM and remain off until the morning light. The same will be true of the lighted signs on the roof of the building and above the entrance to the Citadele branch, reported the press-centre of Citadele.

“Our participation in Earth Hour confirms that we are interested in the thoughtful use of resources and in reducing CO2 emissions,” says Citadele board member Kaspars Cikmacs. “We devote much attention to saving resources on an everyday basis, too. This allows us to cut administrative costs and to make a contribution toward environmental improvements.” “We’re also working to make sure that our internal circulation of internal documents and outgoing correspondence is more and more based on electronic processes,” Kaspars adds. “During the last year, we’ve introduced an electronic bill processing system and reduced the number of pages of documents which our branches need to print out. Accordingly, the bank needs much less paper for printing purposes.”

The headquarters building of Citadele is also energy-efficient. Lights in rooms which are not regularly occupied by staff have movement-sensitive switches, which means that the lights turn on only if someone is in the room.

As reported, everyone in the world is asked on Saturday, March 31, to take part in the Earth Hour project between 8:30 and 9:30 PM by shutting off lights for one hour, thus symbolically demonstrating one’s readiness to become more environmentally friendly and to focus more attention on environmental problems and their possible solutions. It is precisely the production of electricity and heat, along with the excessive use of resources, that creates harmful CO2 emissions. People can combat global warming and climate change, which have become the most serious threat against the world at this time, by reducing energy consumption.

Earth Hour was first organised in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, and more than two million people and 2,000 companies took part. After all of these people and companies switched off the lights for one hour, it was determined that electricity consumption dropped by 10.2%. This year the lights will be switched off at many famous cultural and historical monuments – the Sydney Opera, the Forbidden City in China, the Eiffel Tower Paris, Buckingham Palace on London, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.