|
Not only will you be helping the planet and acting responsibly as a business if you follow environmental practises when you can, you could also benefit your business by:
- Improving your cost control and wastage
- Maintaining good public and community relations
- Enhancing your industry image
- Conserving raw materials and energy
- Raising the feel-good factor for your staff
The green treatment
You can apply environmental policies to many areas of your business, and not just the obvious ones. Here is a list of areas to consider giving the green treatment to:
- Transport (both business and commuting)
- Office and kitchen's use of packaged materials
- The waste your business produces
- Use of water and energy
- Use of chemicals and material - are they biodegradable?
- The office building itself
- Technology systems
- IT service providers
- Noise your business produces
- Supply chain partners
Eco travel
You could also consider encouraging your employees to cycle to work, or perhaps cycle to work yourself. Some businesses that have introduced this idea have benefited from higher staff morale, while communicating to customers that they care about their employer's health and the health of the planet.
Car sharing or pooling is another great idea, because it can cut your business's carbon footprint in proportion to the number of staff members who share the ride. You could use a business-owned energy efficient car for this purpose too, rather than individual employees using their own vehicles.
Energy saving
The technology you use can also generate or save energy. You might like to consider swapping old-style monitors for energy-efficient flat screens, and powering down or turning off your machines at night and during the weekends.
It's also worth looking into green Internet service providers, or data centre suppliers, who generate some or all of their power from alternative energy sources.
Repairing or upgrading, rather than replacing broken or old equipment can help you to save costs and reduce IT waste. For example, you could buy extra memory and a hard drive for an old computer, or use older computers for storage rather than applications.
Waste not
Day-to-day office life can produce huge wastage of company resources. Staff can get into bad habits - printing out unnecessary emails and web pages, not recycling their waste.
But if you train them to use office equipment properly, you can minimise damage to the equipment, and encourage more efficient usage. For example, you could encourage staff to print on both sides of a page, print in draft mode or in black and white only. This will cut the rate of consumption of printer ink and paper so they won't have to be re-ordered as frequently.
Home working
Encouraging your staff to work from home can reduce your energy costs too - heating, lighting and technology. Meanwhile, it will cut the cost and environmental expense of your employees' commute, while giving them a better quality of life. In return, you could give staff some financial help with their bills or provide computing equipment for their home office use.
Finally, by having a greater reliance on email for business use - such as invoicing, acknowledgements and official letters - you also to cut down on stationery and paper purchases.
Related information:
Office Insurance - if you run your business from an office, you will need to ensure you have its contents covered as well as liability cover for staff, customers and the general public.
Business networking - there is a real skill to getting the most out of networking events - read up on how to tackle them.
Motivating staff - making the office a greener place to work could be one way to get your staff more involved - find out other methods of re-energising your workforce.
Related articles:
| 
