Many business leaders think that they need to choose between saving money or the environment. After all, adapting to produce more eco-friendly products, switching to higher-quality equipment or implementing sustainable office policies may seem time- and cost-investments that won’t deliver an immediate return. This has also led to the false notion that environmental sustainability has to be expensive.
In truth, supporting the environmental and economic sustainability of your business go hand in hand. Today, we’ll go over some policies you can implement in your own business to not only curb costs, but also drastically decrease your company’s carbon footprint.
Go Paperless (or Optimise your Printing)
Resource consumption plays a major role in both your business’ cost-efficiency and environmental sustainability. Of course, using more resources will result in a larger carbon footprint for your business. This is precisely why so many corporations are backing ‘paperless’ office initiatives.
The key here is to determine whether swapping out printing for cloud file sharing will result in reduced expenditure for your business. For most SMEs who work with paper contracts, printing may also still be essential. In these cases, you can at least optimise your printing practices by printing less wherever possible, and investing only in printer and ink deals with high-yield ink cartridges.
Buying high-yield ink is usually much, much cheaper on a per-use basis, as opposed to buying standard yield cartridges, which cater more to personal use over commercial print volumes anyway. Buying high-yield over standard yield also means you’ll physically go through fewer cartridges, which helps clear landfills and reduce pollution.
Going paperless isn’t always possible, but being more efficient when it comes to using printer ink goes a long way towards helping the environment and cutting down on spending.
Replace Inefficient Equipment
An important but often overlooked strategy that businesses can utilise to cut overheads and lower carbon emissions is to replace inefficient equipment with more modern energy-friendly counterparts. What this looks like varies from company to company, but it can include swapping out incandescent lights with LED or CFL, purchasing printers with cheaper running costs and upgrading old air conditioners. If you own a manufacturing plant, installing more efficient machinery can also go a long way in terms of cutting down on carbon emissions and achieving your sustainability goals.
These days, it’s easier than ever to figure out how energy-friendly a particular piece of equipment is before buying it. Most Australian appliances come with a sticker that includes an estimate of how many kWh they use per year, as well as an energy efficiency rating out of six or ten.
Moreover, specific appliances like air conditioners and gas heaters have their own energy rating systems that you can refer to. Even if you’re buying products from overseas, you can still get a good idea of how efficient they are by looking up information online or making comparisons to similar products. By choosing the most efficient office appliances, you can save both money and the environment.
Practice Internal Transparency
Today’s organisational hierarchies are much flatter than those of the past. This means that the decision-making power between employees and their managers is actually pretty even. It also necessitates a greater level of transparency, which only has benefits for SMEs.
Corporate transparency is central to both financial and environmental sustainability. For one thing, different departments making their energy consumption and expenditure data available throughout the company allows key decision-makers to identify areas for improvement. Having this information available also holds individual departments accountable for how they use the company’s resources, encouraging more sustainable practices.
Encourage Recycling
Recycling has been around for a long time, but there are still plenty of organisations that don’t practice it consistently. At its most basic level, recycling simply means making sure our waste is disposed of responsibly to ensure no reusable materials end up in landfill. To achieve this, your business should have both a recyclables bin and a non-recyclables bin. If you want to go even further, you can further segregate your recycled waste by adding an organic waste bin, a bin for glass and so on and so forth.
It’s also important to make sure your staff is knowledgeable enough to know where to throw their trash. Some ways to do this include giving informational handouts and holding recycling information sessions. Make sure that your employees are educated in proper waste management, and you can make sure that the refuse produced during your day-to-day operations finds new life.
Implement a Remote Work Policy
Among the best ways to lower your carbon emissions is to allow your employees to work remotely some of the time. While working from home has existed for quite a long time, it really came to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Australia and most other countries were enforcing strict lockdown policies. Today, many companies are seeing the benefits of remote and hybrid policies, and the practice has stuck around.
There are countless benefits to working from home. As mentioned, it helps lower your carbon emissions: remote work means that employees don’t need to drive cars or take public transport all the way to the office, thus saving on gas and preventing carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere. A remote or hybrid arrangement also means that your employees don’t spend all their time in the office, which saves on expenses such as water and electricity.
Work with Local Suppliers
Finally, one of the most effective methods for lowering your carbon emissions is cutting out all the emissions resulting from transportation costs. Yes, implementing hybrid or remote work policies makes a huge contribution here already. But if your office is using imported supplies, you’re likely footing the bill for not only import taxes but also the financial (and carbon) costs of global shipping.
Thankfully, we have a flourishing manufacturing sector here in Australia, so local SMEs can easily swap out their off-shore suppliers for local partners. In fact, if you have the option to do so, why not go hyperlocal and establish a supplier relationship with a fellow neighbouring small business owner? Not only will you cut your carbon emissions down substantially, but you’ll also strengthen your company’s local presence and perhaps even maintain more commercial opportunities in the long term.
Keep your Workplace Lean & Green
Sustainability has undoubtedly become a bit of a buzzword in business, but still so many business leaders have merely the vaguest notion of what it actually means.
In this article, we’ve gone over some ways to achieve office sustainability by curbing overhead costs and lowering carbon emissions. Implement them into your company’s day-to-day practices to strengthen your financial position and do your part to help the environment.
