Good business and environmental action go hand-in-hand

There is a growing understanding that good business goes well beyond profit. This week saw the launch of a green business consultancy partnership that offers advice on green services.

The United Nations (UN) and other leading world figures have been delivering the same message ahead of this summer’s Rio+20 environment conference.

Businesses have already started to work on reporting environmental and ethical performance, in addition to financial performance. Corporate social responsibility is at an all-time high, with 100% of the top 100 UK businesses releasing corporate responsibility reports.

John Tarbet, managing director of Eco-Nomics, said, “We believe that good business goes hand-in-hand with positive social and environmental actions”.

Eco-Nomics and Planet Positive have recently announced their green business consultancy partnership. Individually, Eco-Nomics works with businesses to make their buildings more energy efficient and Planet Positive is a sustainability certification organisation. Together they will work to give advice on corporate energy efficiency, employee behaviour change and carbon offsetting.

Tarbet explained that the partnership will offer “access to both physical methods and the technologies to generate renewable energy and reduce energy consumption”.

He points out that although people and businesses are “keen to adopt the green agenda”, they “hold very poor data on how much energy they use and much they use it”.

“There are numerous reasons that a company might be looking at the amount and type of energy that they use—and numerous benefits for doing so.

“As a result these companies might be neglecting many low cost, or even free, opportunities for using less”.

Developing environment policies in businesses not only helps out the environment, but also the business itself. Tarbet says, “The reputational benefits of being ‘green’ are increasingly also a strong driver.

“The stakeholders of our clients, both employees and customers, like to see the companies that they are involved with adopting ‘greener’ positions.”

It is important to start making changes because, as the environmental entrepreneur Ben Goldsmith told Blue & Green Tomorrow, “There’s no business to be done on a dead planet”.

If you want to do more to start making your business or home green, then a good place to start is by making the switch to Good Energy, the only 100% renewable energy company in the UK.

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Picture source: John Davey