Top Ten Sustainability Ideas for Small Businesses | Glaze & Save

Sustainable business is more than a buzzword. Practicing sustainability is key in reducing costs, satisfying evermore environmentally conscious customers, and meeting rigorous demands set by local and national governments for green business. But building sustainability into your business need not be a headache. Here are ten ideas for you to make your business more sustainable.

1. Understand your energy bills

Take the time to really go through your utilities bills and become intimate with the details. It’s only then that you can begin to take decisive action to reduce them. Once you truly understand your energy bills you can then look to implementing a system of behavioural changes in your staff to see some real changes. You could also then consider moving to a greener energy supplier.

2. Start recycling

Recycling is one of the cheapest and most effective means of building a more sustainable business; and one which has the biggest impact in terms of positive effect with customers. As well as taking advantage of municipal recycling of day to day waste, the sustainable business should also consider recycling ink cartridges, computer equipment, mobile phones and office furniture. Encouraging your customers to do the same could also drive positive associations between your business and environmental responsibility.

3. Reduce consumption of wasteful products in the office

Practicing greener habits when using day to day office supplies can make for a much more sustainable business overall. For example; printing on both sides of your office paper (or going paperless wherever possible), reusing postal and packaging envelopes and doing away with paper or plastic cups all make a huge difference to the amount of waste your office produces on a day to day basis.

4. Encourage sustainable best practice with your employees

Whether its by labeling the electrical switches to ensure only the relevant ones are used, or by providing training in sustainability to your staff, ensuring that your employees are behind you in your move to a more green business model is essential. Encourage your staff to take up the sustainable business model by providing adequate training, information and encouragement for making the change with you.

5. Retrofit your building with energy saving improvements

Whether it’s installing cavity wall insulation, draughtproofingor secondary glazing, there are a host of retrofit improvements that you can add to your premises that will reduce your energy bills, oftentimes while creating a healthier and more productive working environment for your employees. You can usually find grant fundingavailable for these measures, which you can read about here.

6. Use second hand or upcycled office furniture

You might feel the need for a sleek office space to receive clients in, but with some clever thinking you can often achieve the look with second hand or upcycled office supplies. Not only is this a greener way of kitting out the office, but it will also be significantly cheaper. Source pre-owned office furniture by sourcing them at architectural salvage companies, liquidation sales and auctioneers. Or use old favourites like Gumtree, Ebayor Freecycleto source what you need.

7. Work with other local businesses

This might be a global world, but it really pays to think locally. Working with other local businesses, whether its as suppliers, clients, customers or in partnership, can not only boost the local economy (a major tenet of any sustainability practice) but it also ensures that your supplies have a lower carbon footprint and environmental impact than importing nationally or even internationally.

8. Allow working from home

If you have members of staff who can perform their jobs remotely, then now is the time to let them do that! Working from home on a full or part time basis dramatically reduces the travel carbon footprint of your employees, while saving you energy and money at your business premises. If you don’t feel ready to allow working from home full time, then consider part time or flexible home working.

9. Get your transport up to scratch

Making sure that your transportation fleet has A Graded tyres can save you around 20-30% on your fuel bill. Put car-pooling or car sharing programmes into place amongst your employees to reduce their travel carbon footprint. Or make the switch to electrical vehicles!

10. Broadcast your sustainability wins to the world.

While creating a sustainable business entirely for the green halo effect is not something that we’d recommend, shouting about your successes and achievements can help drive interest in your product or service, but more importantly, it continues to spread the message that green business is good business. Your sustainability successes can by the jumping off point for other businesses to follow suit, and that’s something worth shouting about.