5 Great Business Ideas for Eco-Friendly Entrepreneurs

If you’re ready to start your own business and you care about taking care of Mother Earth, this is a great time to join the growing community of green entrepreneurs. Caring for the planet is an issue that matters to more and more people every day. Creating your own green business can be a great decision!

The green economy is larger than most people would ever imagine. It is worth an estimated $1.3 trillion in the United States alone and employs millions of people. The societal impact will be two-pronged. Your products or services will help your customers and you will also be helping to make the world a better place!

Choose the Most Promising Eco-Friendly Business Models

Not all eco-friendly business ideas are destined to make money. You need to choose some that are most likely to be profitable. You also have to make sure that you have the right financing and business structure in place. You can’t afford to make the risk of starting a green business without having an LLC. You can use an LLC formation website if you need help.

Some of these ventures need startup capital to start. However, most of them can be started with almost no money and from the comfort of your home. You can also find similar ideas by looking at our list of successful green companies.

1. Work Remotely

Telework-compatible employees can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save companies money.

In a recent article by Adobe, it was found that if telework-compatible employees worked remotely just half the time, 54 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced.

The reason for this is that working remotely leads to the use of digital documents rather than sheets of paper – which can save companies about $284 per employee per year.

Telework can boost the total annual economic benefit by $700 billion by reducing paper waste, carbon dioxide, and large-scale energy usage. It’s becoming increasingly easy to heal the planet with remote work.

2. Collecting computer waste

The parts that make up a computer or smartphone are too polluting for places where they are simply thrown away with the regular trash. However, you can solve this by setting up an IT waste collection company in the city where you live.

Open a place for people to take their unused devices or parts there. If you want to save on renting a place, find a small room or a warehouse and take the items you collect there. It will help you solve the growing problem of e-waste.

Then you will only need to sell those parts to companies that recycle this computer waste to give them a new life by making other new appliances with them. There are also universities and learning centers that buy them so that their students can learn how they work or how to install them.

3. Organic food store

Every day, there are more and more people who refuse to consume food full of chemicals and pesticides that are harmful to their health. Instead, they prefer to buy organic ingredients that are healthy to cook their recipes at home. The market for organic food in the United States is worth over $320 billion.

If you love the food market and sales, start an organic food store is a great option for you. The best thing about this business is that, in addition to taking care of the planet, you will be helping to support the farmers in your area by buying organic products from them to sell in your store.

4. Organic vegetable garden

You can also make money with your own organic garden! Here you will need a good plot of land to plant your fruits and vegetables. If you also decide to sell meats, you need to have a good space to raise the animals so that they grow healthy in a natural way.

Remember that you will not be able to use any kind of non-organic products on them, such as pesticides or chemicals. The downside to this is that the growing and ripening process will be slower. This means it may take a few months for this business to be profitable, but the satisfaction of selling healthy products will be a great reward for you.

Once you have your food ready to sell from your garden, look for stores or even factories that want to buy it and sell it wholesale. Just remember that you will have to get the necessary health permits to pass a proper quality control, and be able to sell them to the public.

5. Manufacture biodegradable bags

The consumption of ecological bags is a worldwide trend that both supermarkets and companies that sell non-food products have joined. Therefore, this business, besides being environmentally friendly, can also be very profitable for you.

Here one of the options you have is to manufacture biodegradable bags.

These bags are made of bioplastic, a material that is extracted from natural raw materials such as cereals, potatoes, vegetable rubber and soybean oil. Since they are made from biodegradable materials, the decomposition process is more environmentally friendly than normal plastic because the destruction process is done by microorganisms such as algae, fungi or bacteria.

You can sell them to private customers, as well as to stores or markets where they offer them to their buyers. The other option is to create cloth bags that are also environmentally friendly, and where people can carry both their shopping and use them for example as a purse or for other things.