How to Manage a Greener Business

Environmentally-friendly business practices are a fundamentally good thing for a business to implement. Not only is it better for planet Earth for businesses to adopt green practices, doing so might even save your business a little green in the long term. We’ve put together a few ways that you could start:

Decrease Your Power Spend

This one is pretty basic: don’t leave things on if they don’t have to be. Turn off your lights and peripherals if you don’t need them at a given time.

Keep Your Technology Up-to-Date

Using updated technology offers a few benefits. Newer hardware is created to be more energy-efficient, so replacing these items provides benefits there. Cloud options, like Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365, allow you to scale back on the infrastructure you have in-house, decreasing your energy consumption and procurement costs. There are also benefits to cloud technology that will come back later, when we discuss the remote capabilities that they enable.

Minimize Printing

Newer solutions are also more collaborative, which means that most documents no longer need to be printed, which in turn decreases the paper your business goes through.

Take Advantage of Remote Opportunities

Cloud technology makes remote work much easier to facilitate. As a result, your employees cut back on the environmental impact of their transportation back and forth from work, as well as use less power in the office.

Encourage Carpooling

On those days that your employees need to be in the office, commuting in a shared vehicle can greatly reduce the aforementioned environmental impacts. This also gives your employees a great time to get to know one another as individuals, increasing their ability to collaborate.

Switch Away from Disposable Items

Consider the office break room. How many paper sugar packets, disposable filters, and styrofoam cups does your company go through in terms of coffee consumption alone? Phasing out these items in favor of reusable and refillable ones can decrease both your unnecessary waste and the amount you spend on break room amenities.

Phase in Laptops

Laptops are gradually becoming a wiser investment to make for most employees nowadays. With a few exceptions, these devices are perfectly capable of any work the average employee is responsible for. Furthermore, they make the remote work that we discussed before much easier to do, and use up less energy than a desktop workstation does.

Recycle Your Old Technology

This is a big one. As you upgrade your technology and other equipment, make sure you are properly taking care of the devices you get rid of. Computers contain materials that are extremely hazardous to the environment and therefore should not be tossed in the trash. Instead, after all data has been thoroughly wiped from them, you should take the steps necessary to ethically and responsibly recycle your devices.

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