Living an environmentally sustainable life is something that requires compromise and likely change to what you normally do. That being said, when you only have yourself or a small household unit to worry about, it’s not at all an unrealistic ambition, and there are several ways that you can go about it. What about when you’re looking to become an environmentally sustainable business?

A lot of the blame for harmful emissions often falls at the feet of businesses, which puts you in a difficult situation. However, if you can pull it off, it’s something that you can use to your own benefit in order to draw like-minded audiences towards you due to your shared values.

The Scale of the Problem

At first, you might wonder how difficult it could actually be. The problem, however, is different to if you were trying to tackle this as an individual. As an individual, you can identify the areas of your life where you personally rely on something that might be environmentally harmful and think up solutions. As a business, you have a vast web of connections and are reliant on many small things that can accumulate into a more harmful image. 

Things like air miles from your suppliers, the sustainability of the suppliers themselves, and the kind of energy that you use, all of these things might fly under the radar but represent just the tip of the iceberg. So, focusing on integrating renewable energy into your business and examining your asset management to get better control of your vast and complicated network can help you to get a lay of the land.

Air Miles

What about that topic of air miles? In an interconnected and increasingly globalist world, how are you meant to avoid this? Surely, by restricting yourself, you’re placing yourself at a disadvantage to your competitors? That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, however, and looking away from international suppliers can turn your attention to local suppliers – something that comes with its own swathe of benefits, including a greater sense of integration into the local community.

In your personal life, this is something that you could cut down on by taking more local holidays, but this might only pertain to your business if you’re in the habit of needing to fly for business – meaning that looking for the greenest alternatives during those times could be a priority as well.

The Rewards

With the potential rewards of winning favor with your audiences and in the general public, it can be tempting to take shortcuts to get this positive attention now and simply smooth out the edges in the background. This is an approach that could backfire, however, as audiences discovering that you’re not as green as you say you are could result in backlash and broken trust that is hard to repair. It’s something that’s been known to happen to other businesses, and that might be enough to have you thinking more practically about how to be as genuinely sustainable as you can be.

By Adam Torkildson

Keywords: Business Strategy