How Businesses are Becoming More Eco Friendly

Most businesses aren’t committed to environmental goals out of the goodness of their hearts. Instead, there are number of good business reasons for becoming more eco friendly, including a reduction on costs, a better reputation and increased efficiency. But, how exactly are businesses doing it?

They’re complying with legislation

For big businesses, complying with environmental law is an absolute must. But, smaller businesses are also making a big effort to be more eco friendly, regardless of whether or not they’re obliged to toe the line with the rules and regulations designed for bigger organisations.

For instance, some businesses have signed themselves up to measure how much CO2 they’re emitting into the atmosphere before reporting back to the government in aid of helping the UK reach the targets set by the European Union to reduce energy consumption by 20% be 2020. They’re also acting in line with rules around noise pollution, waste disposal and ensuring that their businesses isn’t operating in a designated protected area.

They’re using less paper

Businesses are also using a small quantity of paper than they used to. Gone are the days of refilling the printer every afternoon (hopefully), with many documents being created, used and stored entirely online. Employee information, pieces of work, contracts and electronic payslips are emailed and stored in online storage spaces such as G drive and Dropbox, meaning that businesses are relying on fewer trees and using a lot less ink.

They’re investigating their supply chains

Shoppers are becoming more environmentally aware, and are putting more demands on businesses to act responsibly and ethically. So, businesses have been keeping up by investigating and modifying their supply chains to ensure that they can live up to the ‘green credentials’ they claim to have. This is also good news so far as stakeholders are concerned: interested parties are far more likely to invest in businesses that are able to demonstrate that they’re ethically and environmentally responsible.

They’re training their employees on sustainability

Another way that businesses are becoming more eco friendly is by training their employees on good practices and the importance of thinking about the environment in their day to day work. Many companies have a formal sustainability programme that they have to demonstrate compliance with, and part of this means ensuring that employees have undergone proper training on the ways that they can impact the environment. It could be as simple as making sure everyone switches off their computer at the end of the day or as big as organising a ‘cycle-to-work’ scheme with an office block running on sustainability sourced energy.

They’re conducting meetings using technology

Finally, rather than travelling across the country (or even across the world, in many cases) businesses are taking advantage of the technology they have at their disposal. For instance, FaceTime technology from Apple, Skype video calls and Google hangouts are enabling business to be conducted without having to hop in plane, car or train. This is great news for the planet and is enabling businesses to conduct a variety of operations in a more environmentally friendly way.