Every business should do whatever it can to be as environmentally friendly as possible. Doing so is important for both the sake of the environment and the business, as these days, an increasing number of consumers are looking to support businesses that are more eco-friendly. There are a lot of easy ways to reduce your business’s environmental impact, and you may find that quite a few of your staff are excited to help out with the changes. The following is a look at how to reduce the environmental impact of your business.
Recycle
One of the simplest things your business can do to reduce its environmental impact is to recycle as much as possible, because a business will often generate quite a lot of waste in an average year, and the less that needs to go into a landfill, the better. Your business should be recycling all the usual materials, as well as making sure there is a special system for reusing scrap paper. If you have enough recycling, it shouldn’t be a problem to have someone come and take it away for you.
Buy second-hand furniture, bags and so forth
The less new products your business buys, the lower your environmental impact will be, because a huge amount of energy goes into making a new product, and you can often get second-hand versions that will work just as well. Whether you are buying furniture or shopping bags, make use of second-hand products at your business and you will significantly reduce your business’s impact on the environment.
Support green suppliers
If you want to be a more environmentally friendly business, you should only support suppliers that are making a similar effort; otherwise, your business’s efforts may be counterbalanced by the lack of effort of your suppliers. Do some research into your suppliers and tell those with poor environmental records that, unless they improve, you will be taking your business elsewhere. By switching to more green products like eco-friendly bags and reusable coffee cups, you may even be able to eliminate some supplies all together.
Print double sided
For some unknown reason, many businesses tend to only use one side of the page when they are printing out their documents, even though there is no real drawback at all to printing double sided, so if you want to reduce your business’s environmental impact, start using both sides of the page. Your documents will look just as good, and saving trees is a good enough reason to change your business’s protocol around printing.
Refill your cartridges
There has been much debate about the merits of refilling ink cartridges, with printing heavyweight Hewlett Packard claiming that one in three refilled cartridges fail, but despite the claims, many businesses have found that you can get as many as five refills out of a cartridge before having any problems whatsoever. If you are concerned about failing cartridges, you can always keep one of your printers running on only new cartridges, but for the sake of the environment, you should start refilling all of those others.
Carpool
Organising a carpooling system at your workplace will help considerably reduce the environmental impact of your business, as the less resources used and pollution created by workers getting to your workplace, the better off the environment will be.