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Looking to reduce your business’ environmental impact? You might be going for B Corp or want to reduce your demands on the wider world because it’s good for business. Cutting your environmental impact can seem like negotiating Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. Difficult, confusing, and far too many options.
It starts by looking at your current operations to find ways to cut your business’ environmental impact. At Floop, we want to reduce our impact rather than simply offset them, so we sat down to figure out how.
Turns out there are many surprising ways to reduce your business’ environmental impact. Many are low-cost ways, if not money-saving. Great news for a start-up like ours where every penny counts!
Here’s what we found alongside some planet-friendly actions your business could take too.
1. Low-carbon lunches: the tasty way
Food and drink underpin your whole day at work.
Lunch fuels busy afternoons. Conversations over coffee bond colleagues. Dinners with potential clients win contracts.
With food accounting for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, this is a great starting point to reduce your business’ environmental impact.
The best part is you can reduce your food’s carbon footprint immediately. You don’t need to invest in fancy equipment or find new suppliers. You simply need to know what food to choose in your canteen, or which milk to buy for the office fridge.
Sustainable food is our bread and butter. We help organisations learn how to make a more sustainable brew and take on the Low Carbon Lunch Challenge. You can even use the Floop app to calculate food-related emissions from office snacks or corporate events.
Take a look through our blog and sustainable recipes for even more tips to reduce your organisation’s carbon footprint with food.
2. Green website: the cleaner shopfront way
Chances are your business has a website that’s the virtual shopfront for everything you do.
We stumbled across this website carbon checker tool from websitecarbon.com. Turns out your website has a carbon footprint caused by all the servers, data transfers, images and videos, and traffic to your brilliant content.
After dutifully entering our homepage into the checker, we were aghast at how “dirty” our website was.
By seeing how “bad” our website was in numbers and comparing it to others, we could make a plan to improve.
We upgraded our website to run from a server that’s powered by 100% renewable energy. That meant improving our website from being 88% dirtier than other sites to one that is 74% cleaner, just by switching our host!
Reforest Group helped us seamlessly migrate to green servers. Reforest Group offer carbon-efficient hosting in addition to funding reforestation projects.
This project also made us consider the climate impact of the Floop app. Now we understand the climate impact of our servers, we can slash the carbon footprint of our own carbon footprint calculator app.
3. Ecosia: the sustainable surfing way
This one’s super simple and it’ll take you less than five minutes.
We’ve already considered the impact of websites. Now let’s slash the impact of surfing the web in general.
Ecosia is a search engine that can be used in place of Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Ecosia uses profits from ad revenue on searches to fund solar power and reforestation projects. You can even track how many trees you’re responsible for planting.
We changed our default search engine to Ecosia. Now, without even thinking, all our work-related web searches contribute to protecting the environment. I’ve even downloaded the Ecosia mobile app for searching on my smartphone too.
To change your search engine, head to Settings in your web browser, like Google Chrome or Safari. Find the Search Engine section and paste in the link for Ecosia. Here are the instructions for Mac and Windows.
4. Considerate marketing: the creative way
Marketing is an enormous field. Here are three ways you can reduce your marketing’s environmental impact.
Limit promotional merchandise
How often have you gone to an event and returned with a branded keyring? I’ll guess you tossed it into your ‘bits and bobs drawer’ to be thrown out a couple of years later.
Promotional merchandise is great for brand exposure but often ends up in landfill or oceans. The easiest way to reduce your environmental impact is to limit your merchandise. If you still need merch, there are ways to source more environmentally-savvy items instead.
Recently we wanted to spread the word about Floop with QR-code stickers. Many stickers come with a plastic coating that can’t be recycled. So we sourced some 100% biodegradable ones that can be recycled at home too.
Let me also point you in the direction of Square Peg Promotions. They specialise in helping businesses create eco-friendly promotional materials like grass seed paper memo pads and bamboo power banks.
Treat your mailing list with care
According to Mike Berners-Lee, sending an email to 100 people creates 26g CO₂e.
How big is your mailing list? If you reach 5,000 people, each newsletter sent creates emissions equivalent to driving more than three miles.
Katie Skelton from Little Green Duck says she removes inactive subscribers from her newsletter list after 90 days. I was shocked when I first heard this but it’s not as crazy as it sounds.
When you remove inactive people on your list, you reduce the carbon footprint according to Katie, help your open rates, reduce your spam score and take off people who are never going to buy from you and might be costing you money.
Our team are also trying to be more considerate about when and how often we message our mailing list. For example, we only send our newsletter once per month to keep our carbon footprint low and share our most valuable insights.
Choose paid ads that fund planet-friendly projects
Remember how Ecosia uses its ad revenue to fund solar power and reforestation projects? Other advertising organisations use their revenue for the planet, too.
We played around with paid ads on some of the major social networks when we launched Floop. We found it creepy how much user data there is and we weren’t fans of spending our precious pounds this way.
This inspired us to create an in-app marketplace to feature products and services from sustainable businesses.
We love championing ethical and sustainable businesses of all sizes. Your adverts reach people already acting more “green” and they fund the development of more app features. This, in turn, helps people cut carbon emissions (without sacrificing your potential customers’ personal data).
5. Fossil-free banking: the low-carbon accounting way
Have you ever wondered how the bank uses the money in your business account?
Unfortunately, there’s a good chance your bank might be lending to the fossil fuel industry. Their activities and growth continue to devastate our planet’s climate and natural environment.
The good news is it’s really easy to stop this. Switching banks can reduce your business’ environmental impact.
There are disruptive digital banks, like Starling and Monzo, that are committed not to funding the fossil-fuel industry.
Some, like Triodos, are even Fossil Free Banking Alliance and B Corp certified. They fund a range of socially and environmentally innovative projects.
You can check how climate-friendly your business bank account is with this free bank checker tool.
And if you use our link to sign up for an account with Starling, they’ll even plant a tree on your behalf.
6. Refurbished tech: the money-saving way
Electronic devices are globally the fastest-growing waste, with 80% of devices going to landfills, with more than a quarter of Brits buying a new phone every one or two years.
This devastates our natural environment and is toxic to human and wildlife health. Laptops, mobiles, and computer screens release greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to climate change when they aren’t properly recycled.
Most businesses rely on smartphones and laptops. So how can we reduce, reuse and recycle technology in our work?
I’ve been sceptical about buying second-hand tech in the past. What if it doesn’t work? Buying refurbished tech is a sustainable alternative.
Refurbished devices are used or like-new devices. Rather than being sold by Joe Bloggs around the corner, refurbished devices are tested for defects and repaired. You’ll often get a one-year guarantee on your device as part of the service — although do check the terms and conditions when you buy.
I bought my laptop from Apple Refurbished in 2019; it’s still going strong. My co-founder, Blaze, replaced a lost mobile on Swappie a couple of years back that she still uses today.
We know we’ll need to buy more tech as our team grows and as we test new versions of the Floop app. But even a tech start-up doesn’t need it to be brand-spanking new.
We’ve now adopted this mantra for our business
If it ain’t broke, don’t replace it.
If it is broke, then recycle it.
If it needs replacing, check refurbished.
Reputable refurbished services like musicMagpie and Swappie help you find the phones, tablets and laptops your business needs. You’ll save money on buying not-new and could even hire mobiles and tablets for projects instead of purchasing outright.
Then when you’re ready to recycle your tech at the end of its life, check out Recycle Now to see where to safely get rid of your laptops and phones.
7. Remote work: the comfort-of-your-own-home way
If you don’t already, offer remote work. If you already offer remote working, can your team work from home all the time?
According to Moneybarn, the average UK commute is 23 miles per day. Over a year, that’s travelling from Lands End to John o’Groats five times.
By working from home just one more day per week, an employee could save 400kg CO₂e over the year… or you could plant seven new trees per employee and wait 20 years to offset the same amount.
As a remote-first business, we were already saving commuting emissions. How can we make working from home even more sustainable?
By looking at the energy that powers our computers and heating at home.
The money you save on office overheads can incentivise your employees to switch to clean energy in their own homes. If you can, contribute towards solar panels that directly power your team members’ homes. If this is too much of a stretch, then promote the energy providers on the market that provide 100% renewable energy instead.
Your business will reduce the environmental cost of day-to-day operations and have a wider climate impact across the lives of your team too.
Small steps reduce your business’ environmental impact
Making your business more planet friendly doesn’t have to feel overwhelming, difficult or expensive. Start with a simple step, like switching your search engine to Ecosia or choosing planet-friendly food habits to reduce your business’ carbon footprint.
These small shifts and time will see the more complex actions will come naturally, like when it’s time to renew your website or review your staff benefits.
How we help:
- Educate your team on carbon footprints with a Food for Thought Workshop
- Advertise your business sustainably in our in-app marketplace
- Download the Floop app to measure the climate impact of your organisation’s food
This article contains both affiliate and non-affiliate links. We only ever link to products that we use or would use ourselves, and that match our organisation’s values.
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