Green Technology: An Added Cost or a Money-Saver?

Small and Medium Enterprises are always worried about the heavy costs of actually going green, but adopting green technology and environmental responsibility could prove to be a money-saver in reality.

SMEs Going Green

A recent study by the Federation of Small Businesses highlighted the fact that small and medium enterprises are very much concerned about the environmental issues. The study revealed that SMEs are actually very much interested in saving energy. The chief motivating factors are protecting and safeguarding the environment and also, a short-term aspiration for saving money. Unfortunately, small businesses should not be worried with the question whether they can really afford going green. They should be bothered about if they could actually afford not going green. Going through comprehensive debt review could help determine this.

Benefits of Going Green for SMEs

Eventually, SMEs are finding themselves drawn toward adopting environmentally friendly practices thanks to the encouragement offered by the staff, customers or legislation. SMEs that have a distinct edge over the competitors and are progressive are able to gain from business advantage and efficiency savings. There are multiple benefits of going green. According to the experts, technology would play a remarkable role in the pursuit for advantage. For instance, if you are using motor-driven machinery, variable speed drives may cut down energy consumption by 60 per cent. For a 90 kW motor that is in constant operation, it would mean more than £9,000 savings per year. And if you are providing office cars, a better and relatively more fuel-efficient model that can attain 10 miles per gallon, may end up saving you hundreds of pounds a year.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

Even for relatively small office-based SMEs, savings in terms of carbon and cash are pretty easily attainable. The cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular and that is responsible for enhancing the office efficiency and benefitting the environment. When employees have easy access to documents and important data and they may choose to work from anywhere, then commuting could be reduced and this proves to be both time-saver and money-saver.

Cloud providers are flexible and they often offer pay-per-user and per-month services that are remarkably cheaper than exorbitant IT on-site infrastructure which would be requiring too much processing power to operate. This not only proves to be costly for the various businesses, it really proves to be pretty costly in terms of the environment. In reality, the cloud is capable of reducing tremendously the carbon footprint of several business applications.

Being Aware Environmentally

A variety of services can be leveraged rather easily by SMEs while formulating their environmental awareness plan. Something as simple as printing; for example, they could reduce their contribution to pollution and depletion by printing on both sides of the paper and also participate in environment friendly programs like the HP Planet Partners program, a simple initiative that allows customers to return original ink and toner cartridges for free, so that they could be recycled. This is a closed loop program, in fact the very first in the industry, and has helped recycle over 500 million cartridges since its inception in 1991.

These are definitive steps on the road to environmental recovery, and there are several similar ventures which any SME can participate in. Not only do you give something back to the environment, but you also have an opportunity to build goodwill through your brand. Once you are recognized as a green business, more clients and customers have a reason to work with or purchase from you. Several companies have taken their green drive so seriously that they are on the way to zero carbon footprint operations. This also allows them to save a huge amount over time which can then be put into other purposes.