4 Tips For Making Your Small Business More Eco-Friendly
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Climate change is something that many of us are now aware of and are more actively trying to combat in various aspects of our lives. It can be easy to think that the small actions of one person won’t make much of change – but if every single person on the planet took those small changes, we could make a huge difference. In this post, I am going to look at making your small business more eco-friendly.
When you run a small business, especially if you’re a one-woman or one-man show, being more eco-friendly may not be at the top of your to-do list. Environmentally friendly products can be more expensive, which eats into your profit, and it can also be difficult to know where to start or how you as an individual can make an impact.
Making Your Small Business More Eco-Friendly
That said, climate change is an issue we should all be taking notice of and even the smallest changes in both our personal and business lives could slowly start to make a difference, however small it may be.
1. Work with Businesses that Share your Eco Values
Working with businesses that are also Eco-friendly is a great place to start when it comes to being more environmentally friendly in your own business. A little research could help you find suppliers that use recycled materials to print flyers or business cards.
For my own businesses (three blogs) I use Lyrical Host web hosting. One of the reasons I chose them is because of they really try to reduce the impact their business has on the environment – using part of their profits to plant trees which helps offset the carbon footprint left by running my websites.
They also support various charities including conversation charities that are working to save marine life.
2. Ethical Emails
One of the first things new businesses are often told to do is create an email list – it’s a brilliant way of reaching your target audience and can still be accessed even if there is an issue with your website or social media.
However, lots of people don’t open all of their emails and don’t delete them either. This has lead to a build-up of billions of emails, unread, unopened and clogging up inboxes all over the world.
These are usually stored in the cloud – which is hosted by huge data centres which take a massive amount of electricity to run – meaning emails have a huge carbon footprint – and that’s before we look at the electricity used to run the devices we send them from.
Here are some tips to help cut back on the carbon footprint of your emails:
- Have a clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe button (you should have one anyway under GDPR, but my Mum recently struggled to find one on an eBay marketing email)
- Use your mailing provider to look at who is and isn’t opening your emails – and remove those who haven’t read any for three or six months.
- Limit the number of emails you send – a weekly email is far more likely to be read than a daily one.
- Use catchy headings to make sure people want to open your emails.
- Add some text asking readers not to print emails unless necessary and a gentle reminder to delete after reading if they don’t need to keep the info.
3. Use Eco-Friendly Packaging
Many small home businesses rely on the use of packaging – whether it’s for an Etsy shop, Amazon FBA or an eBay reselling business. Lil Packaging offers a great range of products that will allow your customers to recycle their packing in its entirety.
Using eco friendly packaging could bring in more customers as more people choose to make an ethical choice when shopping online – so if this is something that you choose to do within your business, make sure it’s clear on your website and advertising materials.
4. Look at Green Energy Sources
As someone whose entire business is web-based, like so many home businesses are, I am becoming more and more aware of the impact that has on the environment.
I am constantly using and charging both my phone and laptop. And while working from home has reduced my fuel consumption and the need to wash my chef whites every day I am now using much more electricity.
Do you have any tips for Making Your Small Business More Eco-Friendly?
