As we move into 2020 there has never been a more important year for business owners to focus on their company’s environmental footprint. As climate change continues to dominate the headlines 
and world governments start to take serious actions to mitigate the issues, businesses are going to start to feel the pressure to change.
Get ahead of the game and start thinking like an eco-conscious business.
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Use Less and Recycle
A large part of any company’s waste is trash like paper, cardboard, and ink cartridges. This year, start to put in place initiatives that can help your employees to ensure that all these things are properly disposed of. One of the best ways to do so is to hire a dumpster rental service, where they put bins in places that are available to everyone so they can use them instead of leaving trash bags on the sidewalk.
There are now many initiatives all across the world to help businesses to do just this. Using less also helps you to minimize waste and save money for office supplies. You will be amazed at how careless employees are with waste once you start to assess your company’s current waste management.
Work with ‘Green’ Companies
One way to effectively make your business more eco-conscious is to start doing business with other companies thaqt are already ‘green’. Changing to business partners to those with more ethical and eco-conscious business models helps you become ‘greener’ too.
Doing business with these types of companies can also help you to learn new ways of doing business that has less impact on our planet.
Work with ‘Green’ Companies
A huge reason so many businesses are bad for the environment is due to the amount of energy they consume on a daily basis. There are a lot of simple changes that can be made including installing energy-efficient commercial LED lighting and enforcing new energy efficiency protocols such as switching off computers whenever leaving your desk for more than 30 minutes.
One of the best ways to assess your company’s energy use is to book an energy efficiency audit so you can see exactly where you are wasting the most energy in your building. The report will then give you suggestions based on your specific building.
Make sure you also check to see that all your appliances in the office such as the fridge, microwave, and any printers are Energy Star rated.
Incentivize Eco-Friendly Behavior
Just like in a sales team you can set goals for your employees to try to achieve including recycling targets and transport use. For example, you could reward your employees that ride a bike to work in any way you want. This could be extra income, vouchers to their favorite stores or tickets to the cinema.
Alternatively, instead of incentivizing individuals, you could run a competition across the different departments and reward the department that reaches your eco targets first.
Green Marketing
As well as incentivizing your employees to be more eco-conscious why not reward your customers for doing so too? Try run competitions or giveaways that encourage eco-friendly behavior and pick winners who do so. Use the special environmental holidays to market this to the best of your ability such as Clean Energy Month, Earth Day, and Energy Action Month.