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How to Become a Green Business

Written by: abrowell 269 views

Have you considered how Green your business is? It seems that “green” is the new fad, and business owners are clamoring to get in on the action by greening their businesses. This is a great thing for the environment and for the world’s carbon footprint. The key for businesses is learning how they can become a green business by following the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle.

Steps

Reduce Your Consumption

1. Decide where you can cut back. Observe what your business uses and wastes, such as energy, supplies and other materials and start a list of areas where you can cut down. Look at how much paper you use daily. Can you cut down on your paper use? Try switching to digital procedures to invoice your clients and pay your bills. Scan in important contracts and email them rather than printing them and putting them in the mail. Discourage printing of every email.  Program your fax machine not to print out confirmation pages.
2. Check your appliances and machinery. Make sure that all of your equipment is up-to-date and working properly to make sure that it isn’t wasting energy or resources. Furthermore, make sure you properly train your employees on using the equipment that they need to use to ensure workers don’t make mistakes or waste resources.
3. Check things like your faucets. If you have a leaky faucet, fix it so it doesn’t waste water all day and night.
4. Make sure that your staff turns off all the lights and equipment at the end of the day to avoid wasting energy when no one is at work. It’s helpful to assign someone to be responsible for this daily.

Reuse What You Have

Make a list of things around your business that you could easily reuse.

• Again, paper is a good place to start. Did you know that paper constitutes about 35% of the world’s waste? And it’s so easy to reduce, reuse and recycle. Start a scrap bin for paper, that way people in your office can use paper scraps rather than notebooks.
• Consider your staff room, or break room. This area is full of opportunities for you to reuse. Stop supplying paper and plastic dishes and utensils. Purchase glass dishes and real silverware and encourage employees to use them and to clean them after use. Purchase reusable coffee filters and mugs for the morning coffee.
• Consider getting a battery charger so you can reuse your batteries. Try purchasing used and refurbished equipment, or you can donate your old equipment. Some areas have also started reusable office supply exchanges where businesses can literally drop off their surplus office supplies and pick through other’s surplus office supplies for free.

Recycle What You Can

1. Make recycling easy by placing a well-labeled recycling bin next to every trash can. Put extra recycling bins in the break room, by the copy machine and in the mail room to encourage your employees to recycle rather than just throwing stuff away.
2. Educate your staff on the ways that they can recycle at the office to help you become a green business. Some easy things to start recycling are paper, plastic and aluminum cans. Make sure your staff knows where they can find the recycling bins and what goes in them.

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