Green Living Practices

The basic function of a business in a society is to produce, and any good business will establish a strong line of production to generate revenue. However, as we have grown and matured in the 21st century, the apparent flaw of this mechanism is that overproduction can often be a plight on our resources, as well as the environment that we derive them from. For this reason, the business world has started to move onto different norms that are meant to create successful business models, but by using a lot less.

While one of the driving factors behind this shift is an ethical one, made out of respect for a shared environment we all must take care of, it is also an extremely economic one. Take Wal-Mart, for example, who has recently undergone a great amount of effort to make its business practices more environmentally friendly.

Not only did this have a great impact on their public relations (which were incredibly strained, before), but it also led to them reducing the amount of energy they used, as well as the amount of resources that went into creating their packaging and materials. These measures saved over $100 million, annually, for the supermarket giant. To hop on this trend, and find ways to make your business more environmentally friendly, here are some tips for green business practices…

Recycle

The first and foremost, as well as most obvious, thing that businesses must do to be environmentally friendly is to heavily incorporate recycling in their work places. There are countless materials that are used in general office environments that can be recycled, from aluminum and paper, to batteries and old computer parts. Although it might seem that recycling is such a small thing that won’t make much of an impact, that couldn’t be any further from the truth. Last year, Americans used over 85 million tons of paper, which uses tons of materials from trees, as well as energy costs to produce. Being able to reutilize recycled paper uses far less energy to create, and is using resources we already have taken. If Americans just recycled their newspapers, it would save over 25 million trees, annually. Make your office a part of that change.

Go digital

As we said in our point above, using paper is contributing to the removal of over 3 billion trees every single year. While recycling is a huge part of working towards this problem, there is another solution that should be implemented: go digital. Moving your business from one that is based on using paper to be organized and communicate is quickly making you irrelevant. The modern world is built around the use of digital technology. Not only will moving to a digital workflow make your company one that is far more green in its business practices, but it is simply the smarter move to make, in terms of innovation and efficiency.

Turn off the office

Businesses tend to use a lot of energy to operate, which can be both expensive and a strain on resources. Although this is simply an expense that must be made, in most cases, there is a lot that businesses can do to reduce the amount of energy that they use, each month. One of the simplest ways to do this is to make sure that you aren’t drawing any energy during hours that your office isn’t working. Unplugging your electronics when you leave the office reduced the amount of energy that they use when they are asleep (yes, even then they are adding to your power bill).

Partner with green companies

The business world has the remarkable ability to affect the growth of an environmentally stable society by controlling the flow of money to companies that share in these ambitions. By seeking out green businesses to partner with, companies can build a network of successful businesses that will be contributing to a better environment for everyone. For larger businesses, this will also be a point of conscientious advertising, as promising to work with green companies is a great PR activity. Do your research when finding vendors to provide services and products for your business.

If you’d like more information on materials that are incredibly important to recycle, check out this helpful information here.

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