As we move further into 2019, many businesses up and down the country will be looking for ways to improve their sustainability. If that’s what you want for your business, in the post below you will find some great advice.
Save the Planet with Safety
It is ultimately very true that businesses that have safer working practices are also more sustainable than those that don’t. When you need to improve the sustainability and safety of your business, both require a long-term investment and don’t produce big changes or results in the short-term.
When you invest in training for SEMA rack inspections, pay rises for staff to ensure they carry out more comprehensive risk assessment on properly checking racking locking pins, and for better and newer safety equipment, you won’t see the financial benefits immediately. Further down the line, there will be less workplace illnesses and injuries as a result. That in turn means less will be spent on sick pay and leave, on fines and will greatly improve your company’s productivity.
It is the same when you invest in sustainability. When you invest more in switching the energy suppliers to your business, training your staff to follow more sustainable working practices and on solar panels, you won’t experience the full benefit immediately. In time though, you will use less energy and waste less, meaning less money will be wasted.
Establish a Supply Chain with Greater Sustainability
For many businesses, the focus when trying to achieve sustainability is to look at internal ways to do it. Things like decreasing waste, encouraging more recycling and saving electricity are all fine ways to do it. However, while it is good to focus on those things, the things that happen within your own premises, there are other things that happen outside the workplace that are ultimately impacted by decisions you make about your business. It doesn’t matter if you provide a service, are in retail, distribute items or produce them, your company will be involved in some form of supply chain.
Now, trying to create a more sustainable supply chain can be quite a difficult thing to do. This is because you don’t have control over all aspects of it. It is still important that you do whatever you can and look at each element of it to assess what you have control over and what you don’t.
Take a coffee shop for instance. You have control over the choice of coffee supplier you choose, but you might not have any say over the electricity supplier if your shop is based in a department store or shopping centre. But you can still change things you have control over. For example, you could order coffee from Fair Trade and more sustainable suppliers. The things you can’t actively change just yet, you could campaign to change using social media, email and letter writing.
Environmentally-Friendly Equals Public Relations-Friendly
Over the last decade we have seen a definite shift towards companies that pollute and waste losing favour with the general public. When it comes to choosing between seemingly identical products and services, many consumers nowadays would opt for the one that was most sustainable.
Companies that are not sustainable are harder to market. If that was the case, you’d never hear the end of large corporations and companies boasting about how much they waste and pollute.
A business that works hard to be sustainable is very easy to market, because all companies want to appear to be green and environmentally-friendly.