Society has become more concerned with the environment, and many consumers now prefer to purchase from eco-friendly businesses. To be considered eco-friendly, you must become sustainable and be transparent with consumers about your methods. To help point you in the right direction, we’ve put together six ways businesses can become more sustainable.
Educate Your Team on Sustainable Practices
You can’t expect your workforce to become more sustainable if you haven’t taken the time to educate them. A great place to start is with carbon literacy, which is having an awareness of how your daily actions impact climate change. If you’re not an expert in carbon literacy, then register your business for carbon literacy training that’s built around your needs.
As well as carbon literacy for business, you can train your employees in good practices like turning the equipment off at the wall, making sure lights stay off, keeping doors closed, and many other energy-saving actions.
Add Sustainability to Your Company’s Mission
Whether you’re a well-established business or you’re just finding your feet, you can’t show people you’re serious about sustainability if it’s not part of your mission statement. If you haven’t already, we recommend writing a sustainability statement outlining your goals and how you plan to achieve them.
Create a Green Product
A logical part of being sustainable is making sure your product is green, which means thinking carefully about the materials used and how they impact the environment. As well as this, the manufacturing process should also be green, so think of renewable energy sources.
Explore Sustainable Logistics
Having a sustainable product is part of the problem, but all of your work is undone if your storage, packing and shipping processes work against the environment. When warehousing products, choose a facility that uses less water and energy. Alternatively, circumvent the energy issue by fitting solar panels and harnessing the sun’s power. If you have to discard any unsold products, do your best to either donate or recycle them.
Give Something Back
If you can give something back to the community or the environment, it can go a long way to demonstrating your commitment to sustainability. For example, if you have to use natural materials like wood in your products, you can return what you take by committing to planting trees after so many sales. This type of commitment is relatively low cost and is fantastic for the environment and optics.
Switch to a Hybrid or Remote System
If your business relies on office-based work, whether that’s programmers creating apps or call centre operatives delivering excellent customer service, you’re guzzling through energy just by having a physical location. In 2023, any task that can be completed using a computer can be managed through a remote or hybrid setup. As well as making your business more sustainable, your team will have a better quality of life and your business’s monthly outgoings will be less expensive.
Sustainability is an essential part of business success in 2023, so make sure you’re putting faith in consumers by being transparent about your goals and following up on your commitments.
