Is Your Business Eco-Friendly Enough? Check Here How Sustainable Your Company Is

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Is Your Business Eco-Friendly Enough? Check Here How Sustainable Your Company Is

Do you know how sustainable your business is? Find out here! This article explores the most important eco-friendly solutions green businesses use.

Entrepreneurs have a very busy time running their businesses. They are in charge and have to take care of a number of essential processes from sales to marketing, finding investors, and so on. The last thing on their mind is how sustainable their business is. If you're one of them, you need to move sustainability higher on your priorities list.

Sustainability makes a lot of noise these days. That's because today's consumers ask for it from brands. In other words, companies need to go green or go home. Don't believe us? Find out that 75% of Millennials report that they are willing to pay more money for environmentally sustainable products. 63% of Gen Z, 64% of Gen X, and 57% of Boomers agree to that. What's more, data shows that 77% of Americans report that they are concerned about the environmental impact of the products they purchase.

So, with consumers paying more attention to what companies they buy from, it only makes sense to make sure that your business is among the ones seen with good eyes. How do you know how sustainable your business is? Answer the questions below!

Is your business using sustainable products?

Your business, like all other, uses a lot of products in the office, either to clean the place, to complete certain processes, or for your employees to use. If the products you use aren't sustainable, such as recyclable, your business is causing a lot of damage to the environment.

For example, if your office is using plastic supplies for coffee, unusable plastic pens, or single-use cutlery, these products are difficult or impossible to recycle. So, this part about your business isn't that eco-friendly.

To be eco-friendlier, if you haven't already done that, you should make sure that you switch from plastic and single-use products to paper or reusable products.

Does your business recycle?

This one is of utmost importance. Recycling is the most important thing your business can and should do to reduce its footprint on our planet.

So, do you have solid waste management solutions in place? If yes, congratulations! If not, your business is contributing to the millions of tons of waste that ends up in landfills, suffocating our planet.

Excessive use of paper and excessive packaging for products are some of the most common waste types generated by businesses. The bad news is that, while paper can be recycled pretty easily, businesses that ignore their environmental footprint don't manage their recycling process. As for packaging, the story is very similar. For example, expanded polystyrene is one of the least recycled packaging materials.

There are solutions for your business to manage its waste better. For paper, you can reduce the amount of waste generated by becoming paperless. Instead of using paper documents, for example, your business can switch to electronic documents, avoiding printing and using paper.

For recycling waste generated by packaging, EPS compactors are a good waste management solution. These compactors shred the polystyrene, heat it, compact it, and reform it into blocks that have a smaller volume by 97.5%. This makes it easier for your company to store and transport waste to a recycling company that can handle it in a sustainable way.

Do your employees commute by car?

Air pollution is a serious business. With streets in cities becoming busier and busier over the past few decades, the air quality has decreased significantly in large metropolitans. One of the contributors to air pollution caused by traffic are companies and their employees. Commuting to work daily is a major contributing factor to air pollution. So, your business's impact on the environment is also influenced by how your employees commute to your office.

There are a few ways in which you can reduce air pollution caused by daily commutes, such as:

Offer remote work if possible. With employees completing their tasks from home, this will mean fewer cars on the road, idling in traffic, which will equal less carbon dioxide being emitted into the air.
Encourage employees to commute by bicycle. Bicycles have no impact on air pollution.
Provide public transit commuter benefits to encourage your employees to leave their personal cars at home and commute using public transportation such as buses, trains, or vanpools.

Does your company buy from sustainable suppliers?

Your company is eco-friendly if it buys from other eco-friendly companies. Your business needs lots of supplies to complete all its processes. It would be best if you would check the sustainability of the supplies you purchase and how green are the processes used by your suppliers to produce them.

If your suppliers aren't sustainable, your company isn't as well. So, either try to convince your suppliers to adopt eco-friendlier practices or switch to supplies that already pay attention to their impact on the environment.

Do alternative energy sources power your business?

"Green power" is another essential solution that businesses can use to become eco-friendlier. Unlike other traditional sources of energy, green power is generated from renewable energy sources such as wind, solar power, hydropower, plant matter, and geothermal. Using such renewable resources from nature, green technology transforms them into energy that can power your entire business.

Using alternative energy sources not only that you help reduce the impact your business has on the environment, but you also decrease your electric bill.

Is your business using green web hosting?

In today's digitalized world, all businesses use web hosting services. However, very few business owners are aware of how much damage these services bring to our planet.

Web hosting can substantially impact our environment due to the servers used for storage and all the energy used to power them. The best way to cut the carbon emissions of your business's website is to use an eco-friendly web host that uses green energy to run its servers and infrastructure.

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