Pushing to make your business greener is a sound investment for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is an excellent way to provide your own PR material. If you run a blog or twitter account, you can happily relate all your schemes and plans to become greener.
Secondly, it really can actually save you quite a bit of money. After all, one of the easiest ways to make a company greener is simply cut down on your energy expenditure by reducing waste. What does that equal? Lower utility bills!
Thirdly, hey we only have one world, right? If we all take little steps to help protect it, everyone wins.
See The Light
Changing your light bulbs may not seem like the most interesting or exciting office upgrade but they are on the frontline of the battle to make your business that bit more green. For one thing, how often are the lights switched on? Even in broad daylight, there are going to be at least some lights on I would bet – and in the depths of winter you could have every single light switched on for hours and hours a day.
All that electricity quickly adds up, so consider replacing single bulbs with low energy versions, and overheads with LED spotlights. Yes, both types of bulb are more expensive upfront – but they last years longer and cost only a fraction of the energy (and money) to run.
Drink To Success!
It’s probably not going to be possible to ever get rid of the office water cooler. After all, where would everyone gather to gossip about what Tony from Accounts did at the Christmas party? At the same time, traditional style water coolers are an energy – and money – sinkhole.
Remove the old-fashioned model that sees big bottles of water delivered every week, and install a modern water filter unit. The staff still gets cool, clear water (and somewhere to share gossip) and you make the business that little bit greener – whilst saving a heck of a lot of money.
Manage Outside Influences
Finally, one of the things you have to realize in this quest to make your business greener is that whilst many things will be outside of your control, you can still exert a positive influence over them.
Take your logistics chain for example (learn more here). Nearly every company will have one, and it can contribute quite a chunk of the carbon footprint of your company. At the same time, it is difficult to survive as a business without logistics services in place. Consider investing in logistics management solutions that make it easier for your staff to organize and oversee logistics bookings. This could, for example, result in less collections overall where more is collected per run. This is going to help keep your costs down, and your green credentials intact.
Three very simple steps that could see you with dramatically lower operating bills, and give you a business with a clean conscious.
