From Guest Blogger Lizzie Weakly: Five Ways your Business can Help Create a Green and Clean Environment

Having sustainable business practices not only reduces your impact on the environment, but also shows potential clients how much you care about being green. There is a lot that businesses can do to be greener that may even save money in the effort.

Print Less

Less printing=less paper. Despite being easy to recycle, paper makes up 35% of waste. Store important documents online and have backups instead of having a paper filing cabinet. This will make things easier to file as well. And sending digital forms and information to clients helps decrease the waste from paper as well.

Unplug
Turn off your computers every night when you leave the office. If no one is there, why leave lights on and electronics running? To make this more convenient, simply plug your computer, printer, and all other electronics at your desk into the same external hard drive and turn that off when you leave. If you are not the last person to leave, make sure that whoever the last person out of the office is will turn off all of the lights.

Make Recycling Easy
The best way to make sure that no one throws away what they could be recycling is to make it easier to recycle than to throw something away. If there are recycling bins in various convenient locations but only one trash can per floor, anyone’s papers will find their way to the recycling and not the trash. Even if you have been reducing the amount of paper your business uses, employees may have junk mail, papers from other things, or otherwise be printing too much.

Network with Like-Minded Companies
You are what you hang around, and if you strive to be a green business, networking with other green businesses can help you greatly. If other businesses in your area are going green, use their services, and they will use yours, allowing more green businesses to stay afloat. You can even boost your greenness by making sure that everything along your supply chain is green. If your office needs cleaning, hire someone who will clean with environmentally friendly materials. If you need business cards printed, get a green company to print them.

Freecycle!
Go to freecycle.org for new shelves or other furnishings for your offices, because one company’s trash could be another’s treasure. Similarly, if you have something that you don’t need, list it on freecycle for someone else to find. If your company has a lot of employees, you can exchange unneeded office furnishings between each other. Companies like Lakeshore Recycling provides waste removal for businesses as well as individuals. They are a green business who allows for online bill pay to cut down on paper waste, and are therefore perfect for the recycling needs of other green businesses.

By practicing all of these, you will easily reduce your footprint with little effort. By being a green business, you will also be setting a good example for other companies. The more businesses out there that show how much they care about their environmental impact, the more companies and individuals will follow, and the more the planet can cut down on waste.