As we become increasingly conscientious of how our actions affect the climate, it’s becoming more and more important for business owners to adopt sustainable practices. In addition to having a positive environmental impact, adopting sustainable solutions can also increase profitability and boost a business’s reputation.
Today, Plaid for Women takes a quick look at how you can turn your business into a green machine.
Start By Calculating Your Carbon Footprint
Before you can truly know where to make a change, you have to have a baseline of where you are. Visit Go Climate Positive to help evaluate 18 categories of emissions. You can learn where waste from your operations comes from, transportation and distribution emissions, and more. Once you know these, you can then get to work with carbon offsets, recycling, and other steps that will reduce your environmental impact.
Go Paperless
One of the easiest steps you can take to boost your green efforts is also the most effective. This is to go paperless. According to The World Counts, 26% of waste in all landfills is paper. In addition to waste and deforestation, the excessive use of paper products contributes to air pollution.
If you’re looking for ways to reduce the paper in your office, this could help. It allows you to merge PDFs, which are essentially digital documents of your paper records. A PDF merging tool can keep all your documents in one file, which will cut time on having to find a document. PDFs are easy to email, and most of your customers and vendors should have no problem opening this type of file.
Energy Efficiency
You’ll also want to look at ways to boost your energy efficiency. Simple practices, such as using energy-efficient bulbs and shutting electronics down during your off hours, will go a long way toward reducing your energy consumption and utility bills. Further, you might also consider implementing solar power panels, which Solar Flair also asserts will help you tap into a growing market of environmentally friendly customers and vendors.
It Takes Work
Moving your business over to a green business model takes work. You may spend countless hours looking at ways to change your current practices so that you can best cater to the environment. There’s also an investment involved, but it’s typically recouped in long-term cost savings and a larger customer base.
Marketing
Something else you need to keep in mind as you elevate your green endeavors is that you must change your marketing practices. Let the people know what you’re doing to cater to the environment. Highlight your sustainable practices in your written correspondence, such as newsletters, social media, and other publications. This helps enhance your content marketing approach to not only spread the word about your sustainable practices but to also boost site traffic.
Go For It
No matter how much experience you do or don’t have in the world of entrepreneurship, starting or updating your new business and moving it into green space is a great way to gain attention, do better for the environment, and build a business that runs on sustainability. Remember, when you do what you love and do it in a way that shows people that you truly care, success is almost inevitable.
There’s no reason to wait. Whether you choose to go paperless by using PDFs or implement more in-depth sustainable practices, such as solar power, every small step you take today will help you build a better business from the ground up. The more you build your business with the environment in mind, the better you’ll do for yourself today and for the generations to come moving forward.
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