As a business owner, you are likely to be extremely passionate about your company and committed to ensuring it achieves success. This requires you to deliver the best customer service, make high-quality products, and operate a responsible business.
Taking steps to ensure that your company operates ethically and responsibly at all times is essential to protect its reputation. Consumers are growing increasingly aware of the damage caused to the planet due to plastic pollution and climate change. Research shows that an average of 69% of consumers have changed their consumption habits because of climate change. So, ensuring your company is actively trying to reduce its environmental impact is vital from both an ethical and business standpoint.
For some businesses, becoming environmentally friendly is just done on the surface to boost their reputation. For these companies, eco-awareness is more a marketing tactic than a genuine effort to reduce the damage caused to the environment.
This behavior is referred to as ‘greenwashing’ and effectively means that a company is environmentally friendly on a superficial level. Often, companies are accused of greenwashing when they exaggerate the environmental credentials of their products. So, if you are keen to protect your business’s reputation and to ensure that your company operates sustainably, you need to make genuine changes.
Here are some of the ways you can begin making your business environmentally friendly:
Assess Your Utilities
Every business needs electricity and water to operate, so this is a perfect opportunity to make some eco-friendly changes. Switching your electricity supplier and finding one that supplies renewable energy is an excellent way to reduce your business’s carbon footprint. If your business needs to treat its own water to make it safe to consume, then there are changes you can make here too. Selecting water treatment solutions that produce fewer chemicals during the purification process is a great starting point.
Re-Think Your Packaging
Your business probably spends a lot of money on the packaging used to protect your goods in transit. Ensuring your items arrive safely at their destination without any damage to the products is crucial. It is also vital to find ways to package your products that do not damage the environment. Looking for ingenious packaging solutions that are environmentally friendly and protect your products is an ideal opportunity to help your products stand out. Finding a quirky packaging solution can increase the appeal of your products, ensure they are shipped safely, and protect the environment all at once.
Examine Shipping Methods
Getting your goods to your customers quickly is essential when you run a business. Constantly sending packages to be shipped can increase your business’s carbon footprint and harm your efforts to be more environmentally friendly. You could try to reduce the number of trucks you have on the road by reconfiguring your delivery times and the frequency that you ship goods. Alternatively, finding couriers that use electric vehicles to transport packages is an excellent way to reduce the impact of getting your products to your customers.
