(Akiit.com) It is one of the main components of an ethical business. When it comes to the topic of business ethics, ensuring you have a solid environmental stance is essential. But it can be a difficult thing to achieve, especially for those businesses that aren’t up to date with modern business practices or are struggling financially. But there are things that we can do, despite how much or how little we have in terms of finances, so that our business can be dragged into the 21st century, maintain a small carbon footprint, but also, use this as a springboard to progress further into a more ethical mindset. What are these?
Recycle And Provide Waste Management On-Site
This is especially crucial if you run something like a construction business. Getting an item like a commercial trash compactor or having the opportunity to recycle on-site gives you a better chance of taking responsibility for the waste that you produce. If we all started to take responsibility for the ways that we can recycle certain components, such as electronics, we will stand a better chance of protecting our business and operating with a more ethical mindset in a cultural way.
Minimize Your Building’s Carbon Footprint
The carbon footprint is the name of the game. And while there are initiatives in place to cut emissions, it’s important to find the ways in which you can reduce the footprint of your building. Moving into an office that you rent makes it more difficult, but what you can do in the meantime is investigate the incentive programs that are offered in your state for upgrading aspects of the building, like installing solar panels or HVAC systems.
Make The Switch To Cloud Computing
Cloud computing provides many benefits for small businesses, not least in a financial sense, but upgrading to cloud computing can benefit the environment. It allows employees to access information from anywhere, which can reduce travel costs as well as minimize the need for hard copies of documents. Cloud computing is a better alternative to purchasing a physical server. And also, when you think about how cloud computing is accessed through various devices, there isn’t a need to use big, bulky, environmentally unfriendly computers.
Get Into The Sustainability Mindset
It isn’t just about the practices you implement, but it’s the mindset you communicate. In a working environment, it’s easy to tell people to commute to the office, but you need to practice what you preach! When you own a business, one of the best ways to truly tackle sustainability is to work with other businesses that have the same idea as you. Working with other companies can help you to spearhead a collective action plan so that everybody’s carbon footprint is reduced. It’s a perfect way to network with other companies, and by partnering with other owners, as well as local governments, you can kill two birds with one stone by promoting your business as a sustainable entity, but also entice new customers that would like to purchase from a company that truly has their finger on the pulse.
Stop Relying On Convenience
Another aspect of our ethical mindset is breaking that addiction to convenience products. While most of us are pretty skilled at recycling, we still produce a lot of garbage. So what can we do instead? It’s about looking at the areas where we use things like single-use plastics or something like a single-cup pod coffee maker in the office. It’s also worth encouraging your employees to bring their own refillable water bottles and cups, as well as go paperless.
Encourage Remote Working
Remote working isn’t just one of the greatest ways to minimize stress from the perspective of an employee, for you you could run an entire business from a home office. Because of the abundance of mobile devices and videoconferencing services, it has never been easier to run an entire business without actually speaking to someone in person. It also has numerous benefits in terms of business tax, but environmentally, it minimizes the need for expensive, bulky servers, and uses cloud computing effortlessly. As well as this, think about the vast reduction in commuting and other methods that employees need to get to the office, as well as things like purchasing their food at lunchtime, which has a knock-on effect in terms of food production that increases carbon footprint, like meat.
It has never been easier to take an environmentally friendly stance with your business and these are a handful of simple ways that you can take control. Every company now touts its ability to be environmentally friendly, but are they doing everything they can?
Staff Writer; Ricky Moore