How to Build a Sustainable Start Up | Glaze & Save
When starting a business, sustainability and an environmental ethos are often the furthest thing from the budding entrepreneur’s mind. Conventional wisdom often dictates that a business must be profitable before it can become ethical, but we at Glaze & Save have striven to build sustainability and environmental accountability from the very foundations of the company.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that we would seek to create a company that leaves a minimal impact on the earth. Glaze & Save’s owner, Dr Tanya Ewing, was awarded Top Scot for the Environment in 2008 for her groundbreaking inventions in smart meter technology. With Glaze & Save, as with Tanya, sustainability is a passion that permeates everything that we do. So without further ado, we present our four ways to build sustainability into your business from it’s very inception.
1. Commit to the Circular Economy
At the heart of the Glaze & Save business ethos is a firm commitment to the circular economy, and by aligning your own start up with the circular economy, a more sustainable outcome is virtually inevitable.
The circular economy is an alternative to model our ‘make, use, dispose’ culture which means re-using products and materials continually. At the moment we tend to make goods, use them and then throw them away. We live in a society where it is normal to regularly upgrade our gadgets to the latest model but we don’t design them to be re-used or repurposed.
In the circular economy your phone would have been designed so it could be easily repaired, and upgraded to prolong its use. At the end of its useful life, the phone would be easy to disassemble so that the components and raw materials could be re-used in another phone, made into a different product, or returned safely to nature.
By recycling over 95% of the materials used in our production and installation process ,we hope to create a company that is as sustainable as it is innovative.
2. Invest in Sustainable Materials
While it may be more expensive at the outset, investing in sustainable materials shows true commitment to your environmental ethos. At Glaze & Save, all of the wood used in our wooden beading has chain of custody certification, meaning your wooden beading is from entirely sustainable sources.
Chain of Custody certification proves that any timber being used originates from sustainable managed forests. This is a voluntary process which ensures that wood or wood products are from certified forests on account of stringent tracking requirements.
3. Reduce Waste in Delivery of You Product
It’s not enough to use sustainable products if you don’t have a commitment to reducing waste while using them! At Glaze & Save we reduce waste in the delivery of our magnetic secondary glazing InvisiTherm™ by ensuring that we accurately measure the areas where the InvisiTherm™ will be installed, making sure that waste is kept to a minimum. What little waste is produced by our installation process is then repurposed into Grade 2 polycarbonate. We also sharpen our cutting blades instead of repurchasing new ones: saving money and resources!
4. Support the Local Economy
One of the easiest ways to build sustainability into your business is to support the local economy. It might cost nominally more to purchase your supplies from local businesses, but the impact on the local economy is vast- plus you are maximising your opportunity to interact with your local community. At Glaze & Save we purchase our safety equipment from a locally-owned company; our uniforms are embroidered by a local company: even the polycarbonate we use in our InvisiTherm™ magnetic secondary glazing is sourced from a supplier in Scotland. Not only that, but when our installation team travels across Scotland and the UK to install our InvisiTherm™ systems, they only stay in local hotels and B&Bs, and eat in locally-owned restaurants. It’s an easy and effective way to build sustainability into your business.
