How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint?

If you’re environment conscious at all, then you want to reduce your carbon footprint. Carbon footprint, in the simplest of terms, is the amount of carbon dioxide that is released into the environment because of your actions in the world. Therefore, every bulb you turn on, every air conditioner you use, every vehicle you drive, or even every product you purchase adds to your carbon footprint.

For businesses, carbon footprint is an even bigger problem because running a business involves maintaining larger spaces, handling business trips, running large machines, and even dealing with wastes of various types. In this post here, we’re going to explain the various ways you can reduce your carbon footprint within the business setup. But first, it’s important for us to explain to you why you should even try to reduce your carbon footprint.

Why Should You Try To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Inkjet Wholesale has been presenting you with various forms of business and office hacks for some time now. After seeing the subject of this post and considering our history of delivering efficiency and productivity articles, some of you may have wondered what reducing carbon footprint has to do with those objectives.

However, if you’ve been trying to reduce your carbon footprint already, then it’s likely that you’ve already seen the connection. There is close correlation between reducing your business’s carbon footprint and improving its bottom line. Virtually, every step you take to reduce your carbon footprint is going to help you improve the finances of your business.

For example, if you were to try to reduce your carbon footprint by way of reducing your business’s energy consumption, then you would also be reducing the utilities outlay of your business. After all, if you’ll use less power, you’ll pay less as well.

Similarly, if you were to try to reduce your waste production to reduce your carbon footprint, then you would automatically be reducing the money your business spends towards waste disposal.

An even more significant point is that consumers and clients are becoming more environment conscious not only in Australia but all over the world. This conscientiousness means that they prefer to give their business to companies that are also environmentally conscious.

In essence, the benefits are such that you shouldn’t leave any stone unturned and should try to reduce your carbon footprint at every step possible. Here are a few suggestions.

Go Solar

This is the bread and butter for anyone writing, speaking, or teaching about reducing carbon footprint. If you’re genuinely looking to reduce your carbon footprint, then this has to be the most efficient way you can achieve your goals.

All you need to do to tap into the power of solar energy are some solar panels combined into a solar array. The only reason why businesses avoid setting up solar energy system is that it is quite expensive.

However, while initial costs of a solar energy system may be high, the entire system typically ends up paying for itself within a period of three to five years. Moreover, after this period has passed, savings start burgeoning too.

Reduce Waste Production

When it comes to making a business efficient and productive, waste is not something a business automatically focuses on. However, you can reduce your carbon footprint to a considerable extent by simply reducing your waste production.

Even managing your waste better can yield results if you want to reduce your carbon footprint and improve your balance sheet. The reason for this is nothing but the fact that waste disposal also costs money and if you have more waste to dispose, then you spend more.

Something as simple as separating recyclable waste from non-recyclable waste can make a huge difference. For instance, by sending your empty printing cartridges to a recycling or Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) collection agency can help you reduce your carbon footprint.

Choose Energy Efficient Lights

This has to be the starting point for any carbon footprint reducing strategy. In fact, every time a business decides to go green, this is something they deal with first.

Replacing older bulbs with more energy efficient lights is the easiest way to reduce your energy consumption and, hence, your carbon footprint.

Moreover, this step requires a modest initial investment and gives returns sooner as well. Also, finding CFL bulbs or LED lights is very easy as they’re well integrated into modern markets.

Pick Larger Capacity Printing Consumables

Picking large capacity printing consumables and other similar consumables to reduce your carbon footprint is as easy as replacing your existing lights with energy efficient lights.

Every ink or toner cartridges you use adds to your carbon footprint. How? Consider point #5 in this earlier post from Inkjet Wholesale.

Roughly speaking and depending on size, OEM, and distance travelled, manufacturing and delivering a printer cartridge to you takes about four litre of oil.

Do you know how much of a carbon footprint you’re leaving behind now? As four litres of oil emit about 14.2 kg of carbon dioxide, that’s your carbon footprint for every printer cartridge you use.

However, that’s only for standard size OEM cartridges. When you buy larger capacity OEM cartridges or generic cartridges, you end up making a huge difference to your carbon footprint.

Run Employee Awareness and Engagement Programmes

What is an employee awareness and engagement programme? It’s a programme where a business educates its employees on various environment friendly initiatives and helps them contribute to the same.

For instance, with such a programme, you can teach your employees to use office equipment wisely. They’ll learn to switch off fans, air conditioners, and lights when they leave a room. They’ll learn not to leave electronic equipment on standby.

Such employee awareness and engagement programmes can help you reduce your carbon footprint considerably depending upon the size of your business’s workforce, the amount of office space, and the number and type of machines being used.

Environment Friendly Architecture

There’s no limit to how far you can take environment friendly architecture. There are homes and offices in the world that do not use electric Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems because they’re designed in a way that they remain naturally heated in cold seasons and naturally cooled in hot climates.

If you’re based in an area where seasonal differences are not drastic, then it’s even easier to benefit from environment friendly architecture. If environment friendly architecture is not a possibility, then modifying the interiors of your office space can also help.

For example, you can reduce carbon footprint by making your office drought proof. Whether you’re using heating or cooling systems, this will improve their performance and reduce your energy costs, which will reduce your carbon footprint.

Promote Electric Vehicles

As technological advancements are taking place, hybrid or electric vehicle are becoming more and more economical. On the other hand, fuel costs are always rising. Moreover, any business’s carbon footprint is typically propped up by its transportation costs.

Therefore, it is safe to assume that you can reduce your carbon footprint by a long way by simply switching from petroleum based vehicles to hybrid or electric vehicles. While taking this step may seem like a huge deal financially initially, it won’t take long for your business to reap the benefits of such a decision.

This is an advanced step to reduce carbon footprint, however. Most businesses don’t take this step till very late in their environment friendly strategies. However, businesses that rely on their fleets of vehicles should take this step as early as possible because it will help them reduce their carbon footprints significantly.