For those keen to lead an eco-friendly lifestyle, running a small business can sometimes hinder your efforts. While sustainability may be at the forefront of your personal life, it can be challenging to maintain green practices when it comes to supporting business success. Fortunately, there are ways of improving your business, so it can be both sustainable and profitable, reducing your carbon footprint and increasing turnover.
Reduce Reuse Recycle
Adopting the mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” could help you and your organisation maintain good habits that support environmental conscientiousness.
- Reduce your business waste by carefully procuring supplies and resources, considering durability, and buying in bulk to reduce packaging. Waste reduction is the most cost-effective method of reducing your business’s carbon footprint.
- Reuse items where possible, such as refilling ink-jet cartridges and using scrap paper for note-taking. You could also donate any unwanted items to an affiliate business or charity.
- Recycle anything you can, from cardboard packaging to appliances. While recycling is less beneficial to the environment than reducing and reusing, it still prevents waste from being needlessly sent to landfill sites.
Switch Energy Suppliers
It may seem like a complicated task, but switching energy suppliers is a lot easier than it used to be. Green energy suppliers such as Ecotricity and Bulb produce their electricity from zero-carbon sources like solar, wind and hydro. Furthermore, many of these companies offer 100% carbon-neutral gas, a significant portion of which comes from biogas generated from organic matter, such as food or animal waste. Switching to a green energy supplier could even help you cut down on business costs due to renewable energy being cheaper to produce than power generated from fossil fuels.
Go Paperless
One of the main advantages of going paperless is the significant reduction of wastage. Thankfully, in the modern climate, businesses are able to minimise paper usage by digitising financial transactions and automating processes using innovative software. Not only that but switching to digital filing supports organisation and efficiency with the ability to retrieve information at the click of a button. To begin your paperless transition, consider taking advantage of mobile apps, cloud storage and electronic signatures.
Green Commuting
Considering how you travel to work can significantly improve your environmental impact. Commuters are responsible for increased air, water, and noise pollution, culminating in severe ecological ramifications. Fortunately, there are numerous straightforward ways of improving the daily commute for the good of the planet, including utilising transport, carpooling and switching motorised vehicles for greener methods of transportation like e-bikes.
Remote working may be worth considering, as it completely eliminates the need for a daily commute. Flexible approaches, including remote and hybrid working, not only help to reduce carbon emissions, but studies have shown that they improve the work-life balance for many individuals. Thanks to online communication tools to support staff and monitor productivity, working from home can be equally – if not more – effective than office-based working.
Use Sustainable Packaging
Sustainable packaging, made from FSC-approved recycled paper or cardboard, is the most environmentally sound way of delivering products to customers. Certain packaging items like boxes and bags may also be suitable for customer reuse, for storage or gifting purposes. You could also consider sustainability in terms of the products themselves – for example, if you sell cosmetics, cleaning products or edible products, you could implement a refill system to cut down on single-use plastic packaging.
Provide Eco Training
While keeping on top of your environmental values may be achievable as an individual, managing a medium-sized business with multiple employees is invariably more challenging. After all, environmentalism isn’t on everybody’s list of priorities. Get your team fully informed and foster a greener office environment by providing eco-awareness training. You could opt for a hands-on approach by taking your employees to a nature reserve to learn about wildlife conservation or simply providing them with helpful tools and methods for reducing their own individual carbon footprints.
Buy Second-Hand
A crucial aspect of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” principle involves repurposing unwanted items, including furniture, electronics and office resources. Instead of paying eye-watering prices for brand-new items which require vast amounts of energy and raw materials to manufacture, consider second-hand alternatives, which can often be purchased at a fraction of your allocated budget.
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