How Sustainable Is Your Business? Here Are Ten Ways To Improve Sustainability

Businesses must be able to share the responsibility that comes with looking after the environment and putting in the practices and processes required to be less impactful on the environment in general.

While your business may only be one of many companies contributing to carbon emissions, you are influential to what the state of the world looks like in fifty or a hundred years time.

If you’re looking to be more sustainable as a business or want to know the ways in which sustainability can be achieved in general, then this guide will share all you need to know. Sustainability continues to be an important topic to discuss, so here are ten ways to improve sustainability within your business.

We all know about eco-friendly practices and how the changes we make to our efforts in life can promote a more environmentally efficient world for future generations.

Sustainability is not just utilizing these eco-friendly practices but also finding ways to reduce the impact and use of resources that an average business or household has on the world.

As a business, there are many reasons why sustainability is so important to the environment and why, therefore, it should be prioritized for your attention.

The more people that are born on this earth and the more years that people live in general, will contribute to the consumption of natural resources.

While there are plenty of natural resources available, the bigger the populations get across the world, the more strain on the resources and ultimately depleted resources mean there’s no much to go around eventually.

Not only that, but pollution becomes a bigger problem, and there’s a significant level of biodiversity loss occurring, which ultimately threatens many species and disrupts crucial ecosystems.

Despite some people’s belief that climate change doesn’t exist, just seeing the change in weather conditions and extreme weather events would prove that the climate is in danger.

Being more sustainable is important because it helps address climate change and help reverse the damage that’s currently being done and has been done prior. That’s where renewable energies become a topic of conversation, as well as being sustainable in consumption.

Improving the planet for future generations

Of course, the ultimate goal of sustainability and eco-friendliness is to ensure that the planet is healthy and habitable for future generations to enjoy.

Sustainability helps to maintain an ecological balance that ensures future generations can benefit from the planet’s existence but for it to also be in a state that’s still abundantly rich in resources and has a diverse ecosystem.

In what ways can businesses be more sustainable? Here are ten ways that your business can be more sustainable this year so that your organization does its bit to make a difference.

First and foremost, you’ll want to measure your company’s carbon footprint to see exactly what impact you’re making personally as a business. This isn’t just as a company but individually with your employees and the wider network in which your business operates.

With that being said, you’ll want to look at three areas in particular. Firstly, the emissions are created directly by your organization through actions such as fueling company vehicles, utility bills, etc.

The second area of focus is indirect emissions caused by the company, such as energy bought from external sources. And finally, the last area to observe is indirect emissions that occur due to business activity like transportation of office goods and supplies to employees traveling to and from work.

Once you start gathering the data from these three areas, you’ll be able to see a more realistic overview of how big your carbon footprint is and how you’re going to go about reducing it.

When talking about reducing your carbon footprint, you’re going to want to set some goals. This is important when you’re tackling sustainability because those goals will help motivate you and your staff to make productive changes where needed.

What are you looking to achieve when it comes to sustainability? More importantly, what is realistic for your business right now, and what could be possible in the future? Setting both short-term and long-term goals is helpful, especially as you might not be in the position to do it all right now.

Short-term goals will also aid your long-term goals and help get you to that point further down the line.

Going paperless certainly has its advantages and is a sustainable way of reducing your impact on the environment and the number of trees that need to be chopped down in order to make the paper.

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You see great examples of how businesses are going paperless, like how Death Wish Coffee went paperless & mastered SQF. There are success stories that lie in transferring your physical documents into digital ones and operating solely through digital means.

While going paperless might not be possible for every business, there are certain degrees of change you can make to reduce the amount of paper being used. For some, it might be possible to eradicate the usage of paper altogether.

Energy-efficient lighting is certainly something to explore when it comes to improving sustainability within your business.

There are lots of beneficial lighting options that are going to help you conserve more of the energy you’d otherwise use with traditional lights that suck up all of the energy unnecessarily.

Energy-efficient lighting is a small change that can help you be more sustainable with the indirect emissions you’re using when it comes to your energy usage as a company.

There are a number of renewable energy resources worth considering when shifting to a more sustainable mindset.

The most common being solar panel energy, which is being used more and more both commercially and domestically on properties.

It’s useful to look at what renewable resources you could be using for your business, especially as these renewable energies are becoming more affordable and accessible. Electric cars are also a good way of reducing the consumption of harmful fossil fuels like petrol and diesel. 

Reducing and recycling are two processes that you should already have in place as a business. If not, then you’re contributing a lot more waste as a result.

Reducing your consumption of everything in general can help to lower your carbon footprint. At the same time, you should consider recycling and upcycling things that you might have otherwise chucked out in the trash. When you upcycle, you end up using the item for something else and that’s a great way of being sustainable.

Conserving water is a key part of making sure you’re more sustainable as a business. Instead of using water from a hose outside to do property maintenance, water tanks can be helpful for business premises to have.

These tanks will collect rainwater and gardeners, and business operations can use this water efficiently for exterior maintenance and upkeep.

While water tanks are commonly used on domestic properties, more businesses are seeing the benefit that they can bring to save money on water bills and improve sustainable practices too.

Some of the equipment within your workplace is likely utilizing a lot of energy and, therefore, is a big contributor to your carbon footprint.

To help in being more sustainable, there might be plenty of equipment that is long overdue for a replacement and will, therefore, be more efficient for the business and it’s energy usage as a result.

Identify where this equipment is and look to replace it sooner rather than later.

Working with sustainably-driven suppliers is important and is definitely something that you should do more of. While there are some great suppliers out there who have the same views and alignment with sustainability as you perhaps do or would like to, there are some who don’t care.

It’s important that you’re setting a precedent when it comes to sustainability and instead of following others, being the leader for sustainable practices in your business. That will only benefit your reputation with customers.

Finally, where possible, you should set up a sustainable team internally to help drive efforts specifically for the purpose of sustainable improvement in the workplace. Assemble team members who care deeply and passionately for the environment and fund their passions as a side project for the business. 

Every effort that is made to be more sustainable as a business is only going to benefit your organization in the long term. Find ways to be more sustainable and use these tips above to help put your business on the right side of history when it comes to making meaningful and impactful changes to the environment we live in.

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