10 steps to going green

Almost every business has an impact on the environment. Depending on your enterprise, keeping this 'footprint' to a minimum could either be a central part of what you

Start recycling

Paper makes up approximately 70% of all office waste in the UK. If you want to do something about this, it is easy to set up a recycling scheme in your office – not just for paper, but for metal, glass, print cartridges and other materials too. The website - www.recycle-more.co.uk - which lists telephone numbers for every local authority in the UK will help you put this into practice.

When printer manufacturer Lexmark carried out a survey of UK offices in 2004, it found that £230m worth of printed paper is wasted in British businesses every year; incredibly, a fifth of the 110 billion sheets printed (the equivalent of one million trees) are lost on desks, left on the printer or binned within five minutes.

Cutting down on waste is a challenge for every business. If you want to streamline yours, you could first look at your energy needs; are you switching off lights, unused plugs and using energy-efficient light bulbs. What about your water usage? Simple steps, such as putting a glass jar in the toilet tank (which reduces the amount of water used per flush) can make a difference. The best part is that your efforts won't just benefit the environment, but will reduce your energy and stationery bills too.

Buy green

If you are going to run your business from a building, such as an office or factory, you may need to buy in a lot of supplies: stationery, cleaning products, furniture, toilet paper, and hot drinks. You should try to deal with an ethical supplier, such as one like www.greenyouroffice.co.uk which only sells products that promote ecological sustainability, social justice and fair trade principles.

Cut the commute

Not such an issue if you're starting out from your kitchen table, but transport to work is worth considering if you intend to rent an office or begin hiring staff. Encouraging people to use bikes or public transport can help cut pollution and congestion. In the last 50 years, the number of private cars in the UK has risen from approximately two million to around 25 million, so anything you can do to slim the numbers – such as installing bicycle stands or organising a car pool scheme – can only be positive.

Use recycled stationery

The Environment Agency reports that every tonne of recycled paper saves 17 trees and 32,000 litres of water. As well as diverting paper from landfill sites and reducing the amount of chlorine used in manufacture, recycled paper is usually no more expensive to buy and of no discernibly different quality.

Choose ethical services

When you start up a business, you will need to choose a number of different services, such as bank accounts and insurance policies. Your ethics could influence these decisions in many ways. When you open an account for your ethical business, do you care how ethical your bank is? If not, you may only decide to look for the best interest rates and overdraft deal. But if you don't want to support a bank which may fund international arms deals or oil drilling, there are a number of ethical options out there.

Employ clean design and technology

If you plan to launch a new product, there are many ways to incorporate your ethics from the very start. If you want to check that every stage of your design process is as environmentally friendly as possible, you could talk to DesignTrack, a free and confidential service offered by the Envirowise agency. They will send over a design advisor to look at your idea, and suggest ways to reduce the environmental impact of your product over its entire lifecycle.

Use eco-friendly packaging

As a nation, we generate some 400m tonnes of waste annually, a figure which is growing by 3% each year. Much of this is product packaging, frequently plastic-based and hugely polluting.

Regular plastic can be replaced by either recycled plastics or compostable plastic alternatives. Envirowise has a free downloadable guide entitled: Unpack Those Hidden Savings: 120 Tips on Reducing Packaging Use and Costs.

by Paul Allen - full article