How Greener Practices Can Save Your Business Money

This is a guest post from blogger and friend of Our Green Directory, Elizabeth Reed. We have an open door policy for guest blogger. As long as it’s green, interesting and informative we’re happy to post.

No one goes into business to lose money on purpose. As we live in the digital age, there are many ways we can save money around the office while improving efficiency. Practicing “greener” ways of doing business can keep more money available for the things you need. This doesn’t mean you need to sign up with Green Peace or other organizations, but you may need to change your point of view in order to implement some of these ideas.

1. Conversion to Paperless – Much of what we do in today’s world is paperless as it is. Using email, you can eliminate a great deal of the paper that your business goes through. How far can you take a paperless system?

• Accounting software that uses email to send invoices and transactions
• Time card systems for employees that are based on a computer system
• Emphasize email for sending memos throughout your organization
• Payment acceptance systems that email receipts instead of printing them

These are just a few implementations you can enact that could save your business money in both paper and ink. Each one can also be considered more efficient in its own right due to the fact that man-hours are no longer needed to maintain them.

2. Computer Systems – Although new computers are being built to be more energy efficient than those of old, powering down these devices at night can save money on your energy bills. This is aside from the wear and tear internal moving components experience as they sit idle. For instance, most cooling fans have a life of 50,000 hours. Once these breakdown, the computer system can easily overheat and cause additional and more expensive damage to repair.

3. Lighting – Motion detection or timed light switches can prevent the occasional “accident” of leaving the lights on in a room. Many businesses have moved to installing motion detecting switches in the bathrooms and break rooms in order to reduce the energy waste. It makes no sense to leave lights on in an area if no one is there to use them. While it may only be one room, the energy wasted throughout the year can easily add up. Timed light switches are common in areas such as storage units where motion is common in the outdoors. As a cat or dog could set off a motion light, a timed switch will turn itself off until a patron needs to access a unit.

There are many ways that a business can save money by practicing greener methods. In fact, some have even gone so far as to make money by recycling specific products. Regardless of your company’s focus, green innovation allows you to find a better approach to operations that save money. Not only can you do your part in protecting the environment you live in, but you can protect your company’s assets while doing so.

Author Bio:

Elizabeth Reed is a freelance writer and a resident blogger at Liveinnanny.org. She particularly enjoys writing about parenting, childcare, health and wellness. In addition, she is an expert consultant on issues related to household management and kids.

Attacking the Plastic Waste Epidemic Head On

We were very pleased to discover this organization called the Plastic Bank. 

It’s predicated on the idea that waste plastic, which is one of the world’s most daunting environmental challenges, possesses what they believe to be an “abundance of opportunity”.

Their site, www.plasticbank.org, lays out the argument in very lucid terms and you come away feeling that you are looking at a very well meaning and more importantly, well structured organization.  

We don’t have to tell you just how much plastic wastes is created in the world every single day. But it’s easily in the millions of tons. It’s something that concerns everyone and should. But the vision of this group is to create plastic exchanges all over the world and be able to sort and funnel this waste plastic to wherever it can be most easily re-purposed.

This is an admirable mission. And probably something that would be of great interest to a number of different types of recycling organizations.

The world is changing and it’s big ideas like this that helping that change be a change for the better.