It is no longer a huge surprise that businesses everywhere are keen to be as environmentally friendly as possible. After all, it benefits everyone: the people of the world have a cleaner planet to live on, the customers can feel happy about supporting the company, and the business itself will be put on a pedestal. It’s a win-win-win situation. But even many of the most honest efforts to be green in business are often besmirched by a lack of attention to detail. In all likelihood, there are elements which you are overlooking in your own green policy – and knowing what they are will help you to circle back and realign to your truest environmental vision.
Paper Towels
How many of your bathrooms are still using paper towels? Time and again, this is the kind of error you see in business bathrooms around the world, and it is an especially frustrating one to come across. There is much debate in many corners about hand dryers vs paper towels and which is more environmentally friendly – but the overriding opinion tends to be that dryers are considerably more eco-friendly. Replacing all of the paper towels in your bathrooms with dryers will make a radical difference to what your business is doing to the planet.
Screens
Are you using your screens in the middle of the night or at the weekends? In most cases, you won’t be – and yet far too many businesses still leave their screens on all night, even if they actually turn off the computers and routers. Doing so is one of the most wasteful behaviors you can possibly engage in, and it is also something which is easy to stop doing. If you find this is a problem in your offices, then you should retrain your employees to stop hem from engaging in this particular behavior. It’s a simple matter of turning it into a disciplinary concern – this alone will make a huge difference.
Packaging
The way that you produce your products is one of the biggest environmental concerns in all of business – and something which is pretty easy to remedy if you are getting it wrong. The main thing to consider here is that you should aim to reduce the amount of packaging you use wherever possible. This can require a particular kind of cleverness and originality of thought, but if you get enough heads together you should find that it is easy enough to reduce the packaging you use. In particular, aim to use as little plastic as you can – but also reduce the amount of packaging overall, whatever it might be made of.
Transport
Whether it’s moving products around or delivering office supplies, plenty of transport is involved in business. The less fuel you use, the better off the planet is, so this is another area to pay attention to as well. Use transport as little as you can in your business and it will make a huge impact on your environmental impact.
