April is Earth Month. This year we decided to show up for our planet with a giveaway, an evening, and a reminder that sustainability isn’t a single gesture. It’s a way of showing up, again and again.
Here’s what we got up to.
The Earth Day Giveaway
We believe that small choices, made consistently, create real impact. So for Earth Day this year, we wanted to give something away that reflected that not just a prize, but a collection of things that could genuinely shift how someone moves through their day.
Together with three organisations we deeply respect: Pellennig, Protect Our Winters UK, and Tir Natur we put together a giveaway that felt worth getting excited about.
The prize bundle included a £40 Notos voucher, a set of reusable and refillable everyday essentials, two tickets to Protect Our Winters UK’s Carbon Literacy Training, a 3×3 metre square of Welsh wilderness adopted through Tir Natur, and a surf lesson with Pellennig – including a taster of their Tonnau Award experience.
Protect Our Winters UK: Carbon Literacy Training
The Carbon Literacy Training tickets deserve a moment of their own. This is a full-day course run by POW UK, accredited by the UN-recognised Carbon Literacy Project, and designed specifically for people who love the outdoors. It covers the science of climate change, the carbon cost of everyday activities, and crucially how to take meaningful action and have those difficult conversations with the people around you.
Knowing the science behind something you care about changes how you talk about it. The outdoors community has a particular role to play in the climate conversation, and POW UK have built something that equips people to play it well. We’ve been proud to support them through our membership of the 1% for the Planet programme, a commitment we make every year to direct at least 1% of our revenue towards environmental causes. This giveaway felt like a natural expression of our partnerships, and we are looking to continue to strengthen our partnership in 2026 and beyond to create more positive impact for people and planet.
Pellennig and the Tonnau Award
The surf lesson from Pellennig was paired with a taster of something we’re genuinely excited about; the Gwobr Tonnau (Tonnau Award). It’s a new award from Pellennig built around three pillars: adventure, environment, and Wales.
The award has four levels: Foamie, Mini Mal, Longboard, and Shortboard – each requiring participants to progress through water sports skills, water safety and lifesaving techniques, Welsh heritage and coastal history, first aid, and hands-on conservation work. That last element is particularly close to our hearts: participants at every level contribute to coastal conservation efforts, from beach cleans to biodiversity recording to tree planting. At the highest level, they bring it all together in a project combining Welsh heritage, environmental study, and personal reflection.
It’s a rare thing, an award scheme that takes the outdoors seriously as a place of learning, stewardship, and cultural connection, not just recreation. And it’s deeply rooted in this part of the world: the Welsh names of coastal features, the local legends tied to the shoreline, the living relationship between people and sea that has always defined communities like Rhosneigr.
Pellennig also donate 10% of their clothing profits to organisations protecting our oceans and mountains including Protect Our Winters and the Blue Marine Foundation. It’s the kind of alignment that makes a partnership feel easy.
Tir Natur: A Square of Welsh Wilderness
The third prize in the bundle was perhaps the most quietly powerful: a sponsored 3×3 metre square of land at Cwm Doethïe in Ceredigion – part of what will become Wales’s largest rewilding project.
Tir Natur, Teer-Nah-tir, meaning ‘Nature’s Land’ in Welsh, is a charity working to restore wild nature in Wales at scale. They’ve secured a 1,195-acre site in the Elenydd (Cambrian Mountains), and their approach is rooted in letting the land lead: introducing small numbers of hardy cattle, ancient pigs, and Welsh mountain ponies to graze, browse, root, and roam freely, much as their wild ancestors did. Combined with peatland restoration, the aim is to rebuild complex ecosystems from the ground up improving water quality, storing more carbon in the soil, reducing flood risk downstream, and creating the conditions for native wildlife to return.
The winner of that square receives a beautiful e-certificate with a unique what3words location, showing exactly where their piece of Wales sits within the wider project. It’s a small thing on paper, nine square metres, but it connects you to something much larger: a landscape in the process of becoming itself again.
We support Tir Natur through our 1% for the Planet membership, and we’re in conversations about continuing that partnership. In a part of the world where nature has been in serious decline. As Tir Natur’s ambassador Iolo Williams puts it: “Wales is one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet the work they’re doing in Cwm Doethïe feels genuinely important.” We’re proud to be even a small part of it.
The entries
To enter the giveaway, we asked people to like, follow, share to their story, and comment their favourite eco-hack. The response was brilliant. Refillable toothpaste tubes, darning socks, plastic bottle eco-bricks, and many more – proof that people are already finding their own ways to reduce their footprint, and that those ways are worth sharing.
Every entry also supported Protect Our Winters UK and Tir Natur directly. A giveaway that gives twice.
The competition closed at midnight on Earth Day, Wednesday 22nd April.
Earth Evening: Quiz & Wings
That same week, on Friday 25th April, we hosted an Earth Evening – an earth-themed quiz and wings night at Notos.
It was exactly what it sounds like, and all the better for it. Good food, good questions, and a room full of people who wanted to mark the occasion with something more than scrolling past a post about it.
There’s something about bringing people together around shared values and shared plates of wings that cuts through in a way a campaign rarely does. Sustainability can feel abstract. An evening with your community, testing your knowledge about the planet, doesn’t.
Why these partnerships matter
We’re a small cafe on the Anglesey coast. We don’t have a huge platform. But we do have values we try to live out in every decision we make – from the glass milk bottles that arrive from Pentrefelin, to the coffee we source through Heartland, to the 1% of our revenue we direct to environmental causes each year through 1% for the Planet.
Working with Pellennig, Protect Our Winters UK, and Tir Natur this April wasn’t incidental. These are organisations doing serious, considered work in Wales and beyond – connecting people to the outdoors, advocating for climate policy, protecting land, and building something genuinely new in the Tonnau Award. We’re in conversations about continuing these partnerships beyond Earth Month, and we hope to have more to share on that soon.
Sustainability at Notos has never been about a single month. But Earth Month is a good moment to say out loud: this is what we care about. This is who we choose to stand alongside. This is the kind of cafe we’re trying to be.
See you soon.
