Top tips for being a more environmentally friendly business

Conscious Consumers

It’s all about conscious consumers. This demographic looks to purchase from businesses that have a positive social, economic, and environmental impact.

Taking Steps

Taking steps to implement more positive, environmentally friendly practices within your business goes far beyond being a profitable venture. To become more environmentally friendly in your business, you need to be driven to make a difference.

Making changes to how you operate your business can seem daunting, even if you know you want to do things. We would advise businesses to start with the smaller things and make a plan to implement bigger things over time. 

Here are our top tips for being a more environmental business:

·      Don’t print unless you need to. In past times in offices across the country, you could hear the printer going non-stop. It was a classic sound of being in the office. These days though, we question what we print. Before hitting the ‘send to print’ button, consider whether you really need that document on physical paper or whether it’s fine to remain electronic only. If you are a workplace that needs to print a lot, source recycled FSC certified paper.

·      Recycle. This one sounds obvious and is something we are all encouraged to do in both our work and personal lives. Are you making it as easy as possible for this to happen? For items that aren’t traditionally recyclable, it’s worth checking out the teracycle (https://www.terracycle.com/en-GB/) scheme too.

·      Check out the carbon footprint of your website (https://www.websitecarbon.com) and take steps to reduce it.

·      Encourage your employees to cycle or walk to work and to generally exercise for their wellbeing. By implementing flexible working hours, this allows staff the time to manage travel arrangements around family life, for example. Investigate whether the Cycle To Work scheme would be suitable for your business.

·      Swap lightbulbs to energy saving ones for home-working staff and at work premises.

·      Source sustainably produced uniform if you wear branded clothing.

·      Investigate packaging options to reduce plastic. This one can be tough for some businesses, but small changes can make a big overall difference, and customers really appreciate the efforts to improve.

·      Providing employees with a reusable water bottle encourages wellbeing, saves money for them and reduces plastic.

These are just a few changes you can seek today to make a difference. If all businesses did these, the impact would be huge. We’d love to hear if you already do some of these, or which you are going to action next. Let us know by dropping us a message on our social media, we’d love to hear from you.