Fashion Arena Prague Outlet Promotes Sustainability
In 2019, the Fashion Arena Prague Outlet started to develop the area of sustainability very intensively, mainly by pursuing the Sustainable Buildings Goals, one of the four pillars that VIA Outlets parent company set in all its 11 centers. The other pillars include Engaged Stakeholders (individual stores), Conscious Customers, and Resilient Community.
With regard to each of these pillars, Fashion Arena Prague Outlet undertakes a large number of projects that monitor, for example, the use of rainwater from the retention reservoir or the installation of photovoltaics for partial self-sufficiency in electricity coverage. The outlet center receives clean "green electricity" from Norwegian wind power plants and then charges electric vehicles from a new "Hypercharger" charging station in its parking lot.
In addition to larger projects, the outlet center also monitors smaller ones, including its employees' approach to ecology. These include, for example, replacing all cleaning products with environmentally friendly ones or building compost for restaurant waste. Among others is the installation of a bug house created by children from the children's home Klokánek in Prague's district of Štěrboholy, where Fashion Arena is located. The outlet center has been supporting Klokánek for a long time, also, for example, collecting used clothes for children living there. On various occasions and sales events, the passage also offers food truck with food and drink from Gule sheltered workshop.
Projects lined up for the near future include, for example, elimination of single-use plastics by the end of this June, or the support of the International Recycling Day, which is marked on 18 March. As part of this, AVE company will place their waste truck in the Fashion Arena and set up a stand to sort waste and run workshop activities for children. Another similar event is the World Forestry Day, celebrated on 21 March. The outlet center will commemorate it already on 19 March by planting field groves in the Prague Slivenec district as their teambuilding activity. In the near future, the area behind the Fashion Arena building should become home for bee colonies, as part of the upcoming planting of a new meadow with willows and fruit trees.
This is only a short account of almost fifty upcoming or already implemented sustainable initiatives at the Fashion Prague Outlet Center. "We try to take the issue of sustainability to the greatest extent of seriousness, and to reconcile our ambitious business goals with a vision of sustainable future, we believe that it is possible to give the necessary peace to nature and people including us employees, but also enable the natural development. This is only a new point of view of the contemporary world. We do, indeed, enjoy sustainability," concludes Petr Křivonožka, Tourism Business Development Manager & Sustainability Champion at Fashion Arena Prague Outlet.