In today’s modern standards, ‘going green’ is a practice that many businesses and corporations are trying to achieve. There are countless advantages of going green, from potentially increasing sales volume as customers notice and enjoy the idea that you are doing your bit to help maintain the environment, to increased productivity of employees. The beneficial possibilities are endless which is why in this blog, we are going to enlighten you on 6 ways to achieve more sustainable applications for your business.
Working From Home
To start our list of ways to achieve your sustainability practices you could advise your employees to work from home. If you work at or own a medium sized enterprise, think of how many people are travelling to work in motor vehicles. Now consider how many are using petrol/diesel cars compared to those driving electric. Chances are the majority of people are driving in petrol/diesel fueled cars which is only harming the environment through harmful CO2 emissions. As such, suggesting your employees to work from home can instantly reduce the carbon footprint of your business massively. Although you may be thinking that a working from home process could ruin the culture and productivity of your workers, you could enforce a hybrid process where two days are to be worked from home and the rest in the office. Consequently, you are still gaining the benefits of work relationships of employees while also reducing carbon emissions of each of your employees. Prefect for making your business a more green and sustainable place.
Refurbish and Maintain Your Outdoor Appliances
Perhaps a more subtle and uncommon way for you to achieve your sustainability targets is to refurbish and maintain your outdoor appliances. Examples include systems such as the company’s HVAC unit or your outdoor storage water tanks (if you have one). If you were to refurbish your water tank for instance, you are making sure that clean water is adequately supplied to your place of work. Of course, over time, water storage tanks can wear and tear like anything in the world which, as a result, could cause leakages in the pipe lining of your storage tanks. Consequently, this can lead to excessive water wastage which obviously isn’t ideal for your sustainability targets. As a result, by maintaining your outdoor appliances you are eliminating this possibility and overall enhancing the environment of your workplace.
Electricity
Next on our list we have electricity. Electricity is vital for the functioning of most businesses and without it, productivity can come to a halt. However, inefficiencies and waste can arise if people do not adopt sustainability electricity practices. For example, when you close the building down for the evening, make sure all lights, computers, printers and other electrical equipment are turned off. Additionally, during the day you can enforce that display screens are set to a lower brightness to save power/electricity and try to make sure as much natural lighting is exposed in the office as possible. Furthermore, your company could try to invest in energy saving motion-activated lights. This is so if people regularly forget to switch the lights off when they leave for lunch or to close down the building, energy is saved massicily and contributes to large savings on your total energy consumption.
Smarter Ordering and Reusable Cups
What we mean by this is if you are ordering new stationary as an example, make sure to buy in bulk rather than on individual occasions. As a result, you will be using less packaging. This can be the same for if your workers order food from the same market stall or food hsop. Try to encourage bulk buying at the same time as this greatly reduced packaging and waste. Furthermore, to further reduce your carbon footprint and reach your sustainability goals you could also invest in reusable cups/glasses to refill your water rather than disposable plastic cups. This would be greatly beneficial as lots of workers typically grab a cup of coffee on their break or on the way to work, so investing in a reusable cup would be environmentally friendly as well as a bit cheaper.
Casual Dress Code in Summer Months
A quick and easy method for going green in your workplace environment is incorporating a casual dress code for summer month. As a result, you could reduce the need for AC and HVAC units to be utilised which bring the costs down for air conditioning equipment. To go one step further you could also offer rewards to those who come in casual attire from companies who promote green practices by ethically sourcing their materials and use sustainable packaging for their products.
Desk Plants For Everyone
It is well documented that desk plants can increase the oxygen airflow within an office and improve the air quality too. This can offset any chemicals released into the air by cleaning products, and can potentially reduce the number of sick days occurring for your employees. Not to mention they can look stylish in an office environment and can subconsciously promote healthy practices around the work place like recycling paper or walking to work as opposed to driving.
