10 Actions to Start Your Responsible Business Journey on World Environment Day

Today is World Environment Day and so it’s a great time to think about the impact of your business on the natural environment. This means taking a step back to consider the impacts (both direct and embodied) of all your processes and services.

Take for example a small café.  Let’s say you offer a range of fresh food options for your customers.  You need to provide a clean and hygienic place to prepare the food and a comfortable place for your customers to sit and enjoy their meal.

This involves water to clean the surfaces, wash the food, wash the dishes, provide as drinking water and then wash and flush as needed in the bathroom.  It also involves electricity to heat or cool the premises, cook, cool or freeze the food and then light the place inside and out for your staff and customers. Of course, you’ll probably create some waste along the way and so you need to consider how to dispose of it or maybe you’ll try to reuse or recycle as much as you can.  And I wonder if you have enough space for a garden?  Maybe you can grow your own ingredients or plant some local plants to encourage biodiversity.  All these actions have a direct impact on the natural environment and all these actions can be managed to reduce your impact if you see value in changing your behaviour.

But it doesn’t stop there.  There are other elements of your business that impact the natural world through embodied resource use.  Consider the materials or raw ingredients used in your café.  How much packaging is used in these products? It is recyclable or even necessary in the first place? Are your ingredients sourced from organic or fair traders? And do they come from local suppliers or interstate or even overseas? How much water or energy is used to make these products?  Do you know? What about the waste created making these goods?  Has the producer considered this in their manufacturing process?

All these questions need to be considered as part of your own environmental impact.  You need to consider each stage of your value chain and measure, track and decrease your environmental impact wherever and whenever you can.  There are guidelines to do this and help you manage your resource use and associated impact.  In fact customers these days expect businesses to consider all these issues in their day to day operations.  Some businesses even take this a step further by creating positive environmental impact along their value chain through regenerative practices. 

Wherever you are on your responsible business journey today is a great day to make a renewed commitment to decrease your negative impact on the natural world and safeguard it as much as you can.  For those wanting to take some tangible steps in this direction then why don’t you start with the following actions.

10 ACTIONS TO START YOUR RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS JOURNEY

1. Make a commitment that you start today!
2. Make the waste management hierarchy your new business mantra – Avoid Reduce Reuse Recycle Substitute Offset Regenerate Redesign.
3. Set up a waste system – waste bins and places for electronic and other waste items.
4. Set up a recycling system – look at your waste stream and set up recycling bins or storage spaces for different material groups that can be recycled.
5. Set up food/organic waste system – compost bins and/or worm farm and process for disposal either onsite or collection.
6. Contact waste contractor/council to discuss collection/drop off processes for all the collected materials.
7. Set up energy efficiency – turn off equipment, lighting and appliances when not in use, only use heating and cooling when necessary.
8. Set up water efficiency – install water efficient appliances and equipment.
9. Set up transport efficiency – encourage staff to carpool, use public transport, video-conference.
10. Go one step further by looking after the natural environment through local conservation activity.

BizSafe is an innovative business management training for small to medium enterprises through engaging face to face and online edutainment.  Our purpose is to build the capacity of business owners, managers and their staff to make a positive impact in the business world. Contact us at hello@bizsafe.com.au