Your business should be looking to go greener this year. Not only should you be looking to do that over the next year, but you should also take steps to put in place a new sustainable business model that encourages green behavior.
Some steps that you could take include recycling more and reducing your overall level of waste. As well as that, there will also be other steps you can take to go green, which we will outline below in this article. Read on to learn of four different ways you could go green within your business.
Reduce Your Carbon Footprint And Think About Carbon Insetting
It’s important that your business is looking at their carbon offsetting and look into projects for carbon insetting. There will be many ways for your business to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of it comes from changing the way your business operates.
To reduce your carbon footprint, it will be useful for you to measure your business’s carbon footprint in the first place. Greenly can provide software that gives you control over the carbon accounting of the business via a management platform. You can map your carbon footprint within a few weeks, giving you all the information you need to reduce your carbon footprint.
You should consider the ways that your business can look into carbon insetting. Carbon insetting is all about investing in projects within the business that looks to take carbon out of the atmosphere. The business will take direct responsibility for the carbon emissions from within the supply chain. This involves you and the business getting more involved and looking to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. It’s all about creating a more sustainable business model, and investing into carbon insetting can make that happen.
Become Energy Efficient
You should look to become more energy efficient if you want to become greener. You could achieve this by swapping out your bulbs for more energy-efficient bulbs, such as LED options. This is a simple change you can make, but it could see your business become more energy efficient as a result.
You can also look to utilize some smart software and hardware, that will allow you to keep track of your energy efficiency levels. For example, you could use light sensors that automatically turn off the lights when a room is not in use. You could also use smart thermostats that ensure that you’re not heating or cooling rooms irresponsibly.
Ensure that you are working with a renewable energy supplier if possible. Swapping to a renewable energy supplier will help you reduce your carbon footprint. You could look into solar power as a means to reduce your carbon footprint too, either inhouse or outsourced. An added bonus of reworking your energy sources is that you can also reduce your bills.
Replace Your Fleet With Electric Vehicles
It may be a good idea for you to replace the vehicles that you have within your fleet. You may have lots of gas-guzzling vehicles that are adding to environmental issues in some way. You can instead look to swap these vehicles for more fuel-efficient vehicles.
You can go a step further with this and look to swap them for electronic vehicles. Electric vehicles can help improve fuel economy, lower fuel costs, and reduce emissions. Hybrid electric vehicles will still use less fuel than traditional vehicles. This is because they use technology that boosts efficiency through the way they operate.
Depending on what sort of business you’re operating, you may have a lot of vehicles in place that could need swapping out. Consider your supply chain, and what options you have that you can change within your control. If you are operating the supply chain yourself, you can swap out the vehicles. If your supply chain consists of another business, then you should consider swapping them for an alternative.
Reduce Unnecessary Travel
Overall, you should look to reduce any unnecessary travel within the business. This refers to you, as well as your employees. One way that you can do this is to do more virtual meetings. There is no point in getting everyone together for a meeting when it is a meeting that can be completed over the phone or via video call.
This would save on having all your employees all travelling somewhere for a short time, wasting fuel and not being green. If you need a lot of employees that need to go somewhere, consider offering them a paid journey day. This means encouraging them to travel by bus or train, rather than all going in individual cars.
An alternative could be to encourage employees to carpool together to and from the meeting place, saving on more cars being used. This could also be a policy that you can encourage into your normal working life, saving on unnecessary travel and reducing your carbon footprint.