For many small business owners, it can feel like Sophie’s Choice: you can save money or you can make sustainable upgrades to your business. But what if it didn’t have to be such a difficult decision? What if you could do both? It’s possible!
The first thing that you have to understand when you start exploring ways to reduce your company’s carbon footprint is that the savings may not be immediate. In fact, it will definitely cost money to implement many of the changes that sustainability requires. The savings come down the line, in lower energy bills, fewer maintenance calls, fewer replacement purchases, etc. When we talk about savings, we’re talking about savings over the lifetime of the company. The fact is that, when you run the numbers, many of the changes you make will wind up paying for themselves in the savings they net you over their lifetimes.
So what exact changes can you make?
Going Paperless
This is always the first thing mentioned in articles about reducing carbon footprints, improving sustainability, etc. You already know that issuing tablet computers to employees will save you lots of money in paper, toner, ink, and machine repair costs. At the same time, tablet computers are rarely cheap. For what you spend on tablet computers for your employee pool, you could supply them with printing privileges for at least six months. The key here is to work with a tablet supplier. Contact Microsoft, Apple, Google–whoever makes the tablet you most want your employees to use and ask about discounts. These companies all have programs to help make going paperless more affordable for small businesses and the email or phone call to learn more is almost always free!
The Break Room
You obviously have a coffee pot in your break room. It’s practically a law that every breakroom has to feature at least one coffee pot. You probably also have a water cooler (or a few of them). The goal with these machines is to reduce your employees’ need to go out and buy coffee or bottles of water. This, in turn, reduces the number of cups and plastic bottles that wind up in landfills. That water cooler, though–still uses bottles, right? And, sure, those bottles get changed out and refilled but those bottles aren’t usually recycled when they start to break down (which happens more often than you think). Switching to bottleless water coolers, according to Quench, can keep more than two thousand water bottles out of landfills per year. That’s pretty great!
Change Your Light Bulbs
You probably use CFLs and fluorescent lights in your offices. Most small business owners do. It turns out, though, that CFLs and fluorescent bulbs are not the most energy efficient choices on the market. LED bulbs use less energy than fluorescent bulbs and even less than CFLs. They also last much longer than every other type of bulb on the market right now. Yes, they cost more at the outset, but most LED bulbs earn back that expense in their savings within the first few months of that purchase (and LED bulbs last for around five years). Perhaps even better, LEDs are bright right away, unlike CFLs that start dim and brighten up over time.
Use the Sun
Big solar panels that feed into your building’s power supply are just one way to use solar energy to reduce your fossil fuel energy consumption. Supplying solar chargers to your employees is another way to do that. Most solar chargers have enough capacity to charge tablets and cell phones. You can also buy slightly larger chargers so that they can easily charge laptops. This reduces your company’s power consumption while still allowing employees to charge their devices on site.
These are just a few seemingly small changes that you can make that shouldn’t cost an outrageous amount at the outset and that will earn back their initial expenses fairly quickly. What are some other savings you can try?