Three Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint as a Business

Caring for the environment and being aware of how we use resources are more important than ever. We should all be looking for solutions to save our planet, and businesses have an overall responsibility to lead this change as well as encourage their individual employees to do their bit, too.

Whilst solutions such as recycling and turning the lights off when you leave the room have been around for a while, more action is needed in order to create a greener planet for us and future generations to enjoy. Luckily, with the increasing demand for eco-solutions, there are plenty of ways you can reduce your business’ carbon footprint. Here, we list some steps that you can take, whether you’re office-based or remote first.

Encourage the Use of Renewable Energy Suppliers

When it comes to electricity, most of us might think about installing motion sensor lights, LED bulbs, and turning our computers off at night. All of those actions are excellent small ways to help the environment, but companies have the benefit of being able to think bigger.

Why not choose a green energy supplier? Voting with your money to support renewable energy is a powerful way to make a change. Whilst there’s no way of separating whether you get green energy or standard electricity out of the plug socket, choosing a green supplier means that you put more green units into the grid.

If you don’t want to move from your existing supplier, why not see if they do a green tariff? Whilst this means that the energy company as a whole will still use fossil fuels for their standard tariff, you will again be increasing the number of green units in the grid.

Create a Recycling Policy – And Not Just for Paper

Hopefully, you already have a recycling system in place for paper and other forms of common household and office waste. But have you considered a recycling scheme for electronics? A huge 12.5 million computers have been dumped in landfills since 2013, which highlights the scale of the problem.

In a business, items like phones, laptops and screens go through heavy amounts of use, meaning that they might come to the end of their life sooner than domestic items. Companies may also have a policy that means that they don’t keep out-of-warranty laptops or those that are more than a set number of years old, in order to keep them up-to-date.

Establishing an easy-to-use recycling system means that these products can be repurposed, rather than going straight to landfill. It’s important that you set up a proper tech recycling process rather than just taking them straight to the dump.

Greener Travel

Whilst some companies are able to reduce their emissions from car journeys by having employees work from home, some will still need to be out and about. If this is the case for you, then why not look at going electric with your company vehicles? They produce three times less carbon than petrol or diesel cars, which could be a big reduction in your carbon footprint.

If you’re traveling further afield, take a look at traveling by train rather than plane, or offsetting your air travel in order to minimize the impact of any necessary work trips.