Whether or not you care to believe it, your company’s carbon footprint has an impact on the world.
Running a successful small business is no easy task. You have to work really hard to get to a good place, so when someone tells you that you need to lower your carbon footprint and help the environment, it can be difficult to hear.
The fact is, companies large and small can always do better to become more energy efficient. In this post, we’re going to look at positive business change by giving you some practical tips for how to reduce your carbon footprint. Going green is the future, so read on and bring your business along for the ride.
1. Reduce Business Travel
A shocking number of companies rely on air and auto travel to conduct a huge amount of business. Obviously, sending employees around the country on planes, trains, and automobiles is a huge contributor to fossil fuel emissions. With the advent of Zoom and Skype, the need for in-person meetings has gone way down, so work travel should decline as well.
2. Sourcing Renewable Energy
Every business requires various forms of energy to operate properly, but non-renewable sources of energy are harming the planet. Any chance you get, you should switch to renewable energy sources backed by REGO certificates. These assure that your energy suppliers are all 100% renewable, so your carbon emissions will be virtually zero.
3. Office Lighting Efficiency
Your office is yet another place where you can always reduce your carbon footprint. The most impactful thing in the office is probably your lighting system. If you haven’t installed LED or another type of energy-efficient lighting across your office, then doing so will drastically improve your overall efficiency.
Another way to boost this is by properly utilizing the natural lighting in the office. Situate desks and meeting areas around windows and use film and tinting to properly harness and deflect sunlight in the winter and summer months respectively. The more you can do with natural lighting, the lower your carbon footprint will be.
4. Reduce Energy Usage Where Possible
Reduce energy around the workplace wherever else you can as well. Unnecessary energy waste happens all the time, but using tools like steam traps or analyzing the temperatures in your data room can make a huge difference.
Most of the energy in the average data room is actually being consumed by the actual infrastructure in the room, rather than the equipment being used. Reorganizing that to contain temperatures in specific aisles can help a great deal.
5. Food Waste and Single-Use Plastics
When you have a busy office, it’s likely that there’s going to be a lot of garbage, food scraps, and plastic around. Encourage your employees to minimize single-use plastics or, if you feel strongly about it, ban them altogether.
You can also create a compost heap outside your building where people can put their food scraps. If there are any gardeners in the office, they can make use of the resulting soil in the spring.
Business Change Can Be Positive
Making a business change and committing to going green will lower your carbon footprint, but also lower costs at your business as well. In addition, renewable energy can invigorate your employees and improve workplace culture. When they know you care about this cause, it can be infectious throughout the entire office, so make these changes and experience a green future.
If you liked this post, come back again for more on business, tech, and the environment.
