Green Schemes Your Business can Adopt

Being eco-friendly and lowering your carbon footprint is vital to modern businesses, but what can you do, what green schemes can you adopt?

Green schemes and creating a green workplace are more than just beneficial to the environment – your employees will benefit, too. Natural light and adding plants to your offices are proved to help mental health along with reducing your electricity bill.

But where do you begin? eCo2 Greetings is here to help by picking out some the easier environmentally friendly initiatives you can introduce. These aren’t large scale, small efforts to get you going that can make a big impact.

Read on to find out which eco-friendly schemes your business can adopt…

What is a carbon footprint?

Typically, a carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions directly or indirectly caused by an individual, event, product or organization, such as your business.

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This can include anything that causes the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in greenhouse gas emissions. Examples would be driving to work, energy to power or heat your business – where it comes from – and waste disposal.

Start a Sustainability Team or Officer

If you ask your staff for suggestions on green initiatives, see who responds the most and put them in charge. You may also learn more about them in the process.

A sustainability team or officer can both raise awareness and accomplish more than relying on staff doing it themselves. You can empower them to oversee your company’s eco push. Projects for them could include starting or enabling a more successful recycling program and helping purchase energy-efficient appliances.

A team like this, that may be more environmentally dedicated, can also educate staff. This could be through informational learning lunches or even inviting charities into the office for chats. If you have work socials or like to have a work charity, they can help advise on eco-friendly organisations to choose.

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One of the best reasons a sustainability team can work is because employees engaging one another is more effective than memos from an MD. They can conduct monthly checks on utility usage, the number of office supplies ordered or even which departments are doing more recycling. They can also keep a record of positive or negative feedback.

Tip: Empowering is one thing, but don’t let them go overboard and criticise employees or become an eco-micro manager.

Introduce green challenges

Monthly green challenges for your departments or teams can be a fun way of combining competition and going eco-friendly.

These could be almost anything that’s achievable. Think of challenges like cycling-to-work week, walk to work day, recycling competitions and much more. You could even have a green challenges leaderboard and incentivise your employees with rewards. A great idea is to reward company-branded reusable cups. Think of all the disposable cups you’ll cut back.

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It’s best to go with something easier here otherwise your employees will be demotivated by or just not get involved. Like being set work goals, you don’t want to be tasked with something that is out of reach and be reminded of it. That could just lead to an unhappy workplace and your green schemes won’t last much longer.

Incentivise Clean Commuting

Modern transportation and commutes to work are among the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, so encourage clean commuting.

We’ve mentioned it above, but try to encourage your employees to come to work by the cleanest means possible. Try hosting a weeklong challenge where the team with the most people who bike or walk into the office gets a reward. This can be anything from a lunch out or an early finish. Friendly competition really can motivate people to make a change.

Likewise, if you have a city centre-based office, offer reductions on bus and rail passes to encourage staff to use public transport. The best way to cater for is to provide flexible start and finish times, just in case there are delays with such transport. Forcing staff to fit around a hard start time with lengthy public transport could be a put-off.

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When you encourage people to walk, run or cycle to walk, make sure you have the facilities for them. Provide a space for them to change and shower. Even better, an area for storage if bike rails aren’t available or can’t be placed outside your building. If your staff have to drive, consider implementing carpooling among colleagues.

Healthy Working Environment

This includes everything from natural light to adding physical greenery to your office, benefiting the environment and your employees.

Bring some nature into your office environment. Plants produce more oxygen, offsetting any chemicals released into the air by office furniture. They also make for a cleaner and happier space for your staff to work.

Employees working near sunlit windows have a higher production rate as natural light keeps the body alert, working with vitamin D and digestion. Indoor light, however, is a major disruptor to this. If possible, move desks to within 25 feet of windows and get as much natural light in as you can.

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Natural light and ventilation improvements can vastly enhance the quality of the air within the workplace. Come up with a floor plan to improve airflow or even get a professional to consider the options available to you. Whether it is installing skylights or getting ventilation systems installed, there are many ways you can enhance the working environment space.

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Learn more about what you can do to protect the environment and reduce your carbon footprint with our eCo2 Greetings blog.

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