Benefits of Having an Eco-Friendly Business
Reshaping your business to be eco-friendly can benefit your business in a few major ways. The most impactful of these benefits is the brand image and competitive advantage your company will receive from going green. Protecting the environment is every person’s responsibility, and mindful customers know that. Consumers are much more likely to engage with your business if it actively shows interest in caring for the environment. This will give your company a competitive advantage over businesses that contribute heavily to pollution. Going green will make your business more attractive to potential customers while doing something good for the world in the process. It’s a win-win scenario!
Going green will also positively impact your employees. As previously mentioned, protecting the environment is everyone’s responsibility and your employee will likely take pride in working for a business that is doing its part to reduce pollution.
An employee that is proud of the company they work for will be more productive than one who only shows up to work for a paycheck. Aligning your business with a social movement your employees care about, like protecting the environment, will encourage them to try harder at work.
Ways to Lead Your Business to be More Eco-Friendly
Every business’s journey to becoming more eco-friendly will be different depending on their end goals, industry, product or service, and ability to change. However, there are certain steps every business can take to ensure they are doing the most they can to protect the environment without major commercial construction.
- Create a Green Product
Every aspect of your business needs to be considered when transitioning your company to be more eco-friendly. Going green isn’t as simple as setting a recycling bin out in the office. The most obvious place to start is at the very core of your business, the product or service it offers.
There are three methods to reducing the carbon footprint of a product: changing the way it is sourced and assembled, reimagining the product’s packaging, and reassessing distribution. Firstly, you should ensure that your product’s raw materials come from an environmentally friendly source. This will likely have the largest impact on its carbon footprint. Your product’s packaging should also be reduced as much as possible. Product packaging is a huge portion of the solid waste that ends up in landfills for decades. The emissions resulting from distributing a product to customers are a major contributor to air pollution. By making shipping routes as efficient as possible your company can save money on distribution costs while reducing its carbon emissions.
- Use Eco-Friendly Supplies and Tools
Another way for your company to become environmentally friendly is by reassessing everything being used in the office. This could be anything from the lighting installed to the cleaning supplies in the janitor’s closet. Making these smaller changes in the office will make your company greener, but it will also show your employees that your business is serious about its commitment to protecting the environment. Your employees will experience the company’s journey to becoming more environmentally friendly first-hand and feel more involved in the process. Here are a few quick ways to make the office workplace greener.
- Switch to LED lighting
- Use greener cleaning supplies
- Install a smart thermometer
- Use occupancy sensing lights in bathrooms and breakrooms
- Use a water filter instead of bottled water
- Reduce the Use of Paper
Paper used to be necessary for a business to keep records, make presentations, and share documents. But in today’s world, all of these functions can be completed entirely digitally. This isn’t to say that paper is completely useless to an office these days, but its uses are much more limited than they used to be.
Reducing the amount of paper used in your business’s day-to-day operations will come with a few other benefits as well. Firstly, methods of operations using physical paper tend to be slower than their digital counterparts. For instance, a presentation can be put together and given much quicker using PowerPoint than large paper presentations. This will streamline your company’s operations and make them more efficient. Your business will also save money by ordering less paper. By reducing the amount of paper needed at your office, you may even be able to begin using recycled paper.
- Encourage Company to Volunteer
Don’t let your business’s commitment to protecting the environment end on company grounds. Encourage employees and peers to volunteer for events and charities that benefit the environment as well. Your business could even begin hosting events such as trash pickups to benefit the environment. This will not only give employees another way of being eco-friendly, but it will also attach your brand’s name to an environmental cause.
- Share Your Company’s Progress and Goals
Once your company has made goals to reach and some progress towards becoming more environmentally friendly, remember to share that news with the world. This will make potential customers aware of the commitment you’ve made and the actions your company is taking to meet that commitment. Start a recurring blog focused on sharing the progress your company has made and encourage others to go green as well.
