Sustainability is central to the smooth running of modern enterprises. Customers show a strong preference for supporting eco-friendly brands, and companies that embrace sustainability gain a competitive advantage over their peers.
You don’t have to operate a multinational corporation to benefit from sustainable changes, either. Even simple changes, like taking proactive steps to reduce waste, can mitigate ecological harm and help you achieve your ESG goals.
Some sustainability strategies can reduce your costs and pad your profits, too. This is crucial for your long-term business plan, as tech like smart meters can minimize operating costs and help insulate your company against rising energy prices.
Waste Reduction
Most businesses produce waste as part of their operations. However, that doesn’t mean you can afford to overlook your responsibility to the world by producing more waste than necessary. Instead, start your sustainability efforts off on the right foot by taking steps to reduce commercial waste in your organization:
- Audit: Start by auditing your business to see how much waste you produce, where it goes, and what kind of items you send to the dump. This will help you track items that could have been recycled and give you a starting point to grow.
- Digitize: Paper waste is all too easy to accumulate when running a busy business. Digitize your documents to reduce your environmental footprint and keep paper out of landfills. This will enhance your operational efficiency, too, as digital documents can be more easily modified, saved, and shared.
- Eliminate Single-Use: Eliminating single-use materials like straws and plastic cups is crucial to your waste management plan. Cutting down on single-use items reduces pollution and minimizes the amount of plastic that ends up in landfills.
- Strategize: Once you’ve audited, you’ll want to create a strategy to tackle your worst waste-producing operations and practices. Set goals to maintain accountability and revise your recycling protocols if you’re falling short of your ambitions.
- Reward: Incentivizing waste reduction in your company is the best way to ensure folks pay attention to recycling schemes and calls for reuse. Reward folks with shoutouts, perks, and monetary prizes.
These strategies will reduce your waste and help you cut down on costs associated with single-use items like straws and plastic cups. This can make a world of difference if you work in a high-waste environment and have not previously audited your operations.
Energy Savings
EPA data shows that, in 2021 alone, economic activity produced 6,340 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent. This staggering sum reinforces the need for companies to revise their operations to reduce carbon use and combat climate change. You can take power-energy saving steps today by embracing sustainable changes like:
- Replace outdated bulbs with LEDs or low-wattage CFLs;
- Apply for federal grants to install solar panels on your premises;
- Offer to telecommute to cut down commuting carbon costs;
- Encourage employees to take energy-saving measures like turning down the thermostat; when working remotely and switching off computers that are not in use.
These changes will add up over the year to reduce your carbon emissions and help combat climate change. You should also consider making operational changes that you suspect will have a big impact. For example, if you work in manufacturing, consider revising your supply chain to align with more eco-friendly suppliers. This will cut down on upstream emissions and make an immediate impact on your operations.
Sharing Your Progress
Whether you’re a small business or a multinational corporation, you deserve some praise when you take steps to become more sustainable. However, you can’t simply tell stakeholders that you care about the environment — you have to show them by tracking your progress and sharing key details about the impact that your business has.
Get the ball rolling by embracing digital sustainability reporting practices. This may include utilizing technology to track and enhance your efforts like:
- AI-Driven ESG: These programs can crunch the big numbers associated with your operations and update you on your progress in real time. This is an essential tool if you want to appeal to potential stakeholders and need accurate figures to raise funds or build brand loyalty.
- IMM: Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) software collects data related to the impact you have on the local environment. This is crucial if you plan to take steps to fundraise for local environments or want to measure the change that your recycling efforts have had on the wider ecosystem.
- Integrated Data Analysis: Your sustainability efforts occur within a wider ecosystem. This means you must be able to collect and use external data from multiple sources if you want your changes to matter. Integrated analysis ensures that you are tracking the global progress of issues like carbon emissions and pollution, meaning you can pivot to tackle the most pertinent problems.
Conclusion
Embracing sustainability is a great way to boost your brand reputation and appeal to climate-conscious customers. However, if you want to call yourself eco-friendly, you’ll need to make some serious changes — regardless of the size of your operations. Get the ball rolling by tracking your waste and reporting your carbon emissions. This will give you a clear baseline and help you set goals that pave the way toward corporate success.