Being environmentally conscious is increasingly vital for all kinds of different businesses. Your eco-friendly choices can make you look good to customers and employees and can also save you money. Not to mention, eco-friendly decisions are a responsible way to do business.
It can seem overwhelming to make your entire business environmentally conscious. However, you don’t have to do a total overhaul to make a big difference. You may be surprised by how making some small changes can dramatically improve your impact on the world. Here are some superb ways to make better choices for your business and the environment.
How to Make Your Business More Environmentally Friendly
Let Employees Work From Home
A straightforward way to make your business eco-friendly (as well as improve employee satisfaction and reduce your overhead) is to allow employees to work from home. Whether employees work from home full-time or only for a couple of days a week, it can make a big difference in your impact on the environment.
Fewer cars commuting to and from work means burning less fossil fuel and emitting less carbon. Fewer employees in the office mean using less electricity. Look carefully at your work processes to see which employees may be able to do their job from home.
Eliminate Single-Serve Snacks and Drinks
It’s nice to offer resources to your employees in a break room. However, single-serve snacks and beverages can negatively impact the environment, especially over time. Little paper cups for glasses of water, sugar packets, coffee pods, bags of chips, and soda cans all contribute to pollution and landfills.
Instead, provide reusable glasses, bottles, etc. Provide a big container of sugar or salt, make coffee in a single pot instead of using pods, and stock large bags of snacks.
Consider Eco-Friendly Web Hosting
Web hosting may not be the first thing that you think of when trying to reduce the environmental impact that your business has, but in fact, Eco-friendly Web hosting can make a big difference. If you maintain a website, you are probably using servers located out of your office.
The companies that provide those servers can have meaningful effects on the environment. For example, keeping the buildings that hold servers cool and providing electricity to run the servers takes a lot of energy. An eco-friendly web hosting service makes environmentally friendly choices in the servers they provide.
Recycle When Possible
If your goal is to make your business as environmentally friendly as possible, you should undoubtedly provide recycling bins for the material used in your office. However, has it occurred to you to recycle when you renovate?
Instead of sending materials to landfills, you can donate to Habitat for Humanity. They’ll take your old appliances, lumber, etc., and sell it at a reduced rate for reuse, keeping it out of landfills and funding construction for low-income housing. You won’t have to pay to have materials sent to the landfill as an added benefit.
Eliminate Printing
Many businesses have already realized that alternatives to printing are a good idea. If your business hasn’t, now is the time to make the change. Printing documents requires energy to run the printer and, of course, wastes paper.
Instead, encourage your employees to use a tablet or smartphone to consult a document in a meeting or when on the go. Invest in software to mark PDFs digitally so that paper is not printed and scanned back in.
Make Eco-Friendly Decisions for Your Business
Choosing to make environmentally conscious choices in your business has a wide range of benefits, not only for the environment but also for the success of your business. You can advertise that you are eco-friendly, which may cause more customers to consider doing business with you. Your employees may be happier to work for an environmentally conscious company.
It may be easier than you think to make eco-friendly decisions. Simple things like letting employees work from home part of the time and using eco-friendly web hosting can make all of the difference.
