Five ways to make your business more sustainable
Making your business more environmentally friendly is good for the budget and for your brand, but how can you make good intentions stick? Charlie Duff offers some green pointers.
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Green v Business
Great summary of practical ways to keep the impetus going.
We are currenly in a transition in which much of business sees the environmental movement as being there to clip it's wings or taking it back to the dark ages of horse drawn carriages. The profit motive is still "strong within us" and therefore still leads to grabbing cheap (in money) resources to turn a fast buck, without looking further than this year's P&L, to realise that what has been grabbed and perhaps plundered, will not be cheap (by any measure) in a few year's time.
So, at the moment the Evironmental (Green) incentive alone is a non-starter in changing business behaviour, consequently; "what's in it for me and my bottom line" is the next best approach.
There are books (in PDF!) on all this but a couple of extra thoughts:
Making it easier to recycle is great but does not in itself lead to better use of resources. For example, you could produce 20% more paper waste than you did last year but think that you've helped the planet by recycling all of it. The recycling industry is now huge and full of it's own issues over best use of resources, ie with governments pouring funds into the sector the "profit" motive kicks in.
So, it's a case of taking one step back and asking if you needed to produce or process that paper in the first place. How about looking to get as much information as possible online or on CD? Do you really need those tax annuals or magazines, do your clients really need/want printed accounts? How about returning to sender all junk mail?
Look out for local voluntary organisations to take your defunct equipment for re-use locally. We have a local CIC that, with government help, has trained up people to refurbish IT kit for donation to local charaties. They are now in a position to offer full IT support to local businesses for £30 per hour and thus become self sufficient.
For more challenging thoughts visit the Sustainability discussion group:
http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/group/sustainability-and-accountants-discussion-group