Pledge to go green in the workplace and you may find that reducing your carbon footprint not only helps to look after our planet, it has benefits for your business too.

If it feels like your business has a long way to go before it can call itself environmentally friendly, you can begin by implementing one small and manageable step at a time to reduce your business’ carbon footprint and for peace of mind that you’re doing your bit to look after our planet.

Here are four key areas to consider when beginning your journey to becoming a greener business.

Recycle

If your business doesn’t already recycle then this is a great place to begin your journey.  Identify what waste your business produces that could be recycled and source recycling bins to place in strategic locations around the office.  Reducing the amount of waste that you send to the landfill and recycling it instead will lower your business’ carbon footprint. Make sure that shredders are emptied into a paper only.

You can also save money by sending ink cartridges back on a recycling scheme when ordering your new ones for a discounted rate. As well as this you can recycle any old equipment such as projectors or old company handsets.

Make sure the option is there for your employees, with any canteen areas and waste areas being equipped with recycling specific boxes or bins also.

Go paperless

Most offices are guilty of getting through huge amounts of paper. Think about the number of things that get printed out by your office daily; the list may include documents, emails, meeting notes, payslips and timesheets to name just a few, how many of them are really necessary?

With technology now being as advanced as it is, going paperless may be far easier than you think.  Using specialist software like Practical Software makes it easy to email payslips and allow employees to submit timesheets online, eliminating the paper trail and saving you time in the process.

Choose green suppliers

As well as making changes to become greener yourself, it’s important to also make environmentally friendly choices about the businesses you source your materials or services from.  If you’re not sure what your suppliers’ green policies are then now is the time to start doing your research!  Look out for suppliers that produce products sustainably and use recycled and environmentally friendly materials and substances.

As well as this, try and make the office sustainably sourced, not just the products or services you provide. Office furniture of course for one, make sure that if you’re buying wooden desks that they are from sustainably sourced tree farms or wood producers. Any office paper or stationary can be purchased from carbon neutral suppliers.

On top of equipment you can also make sure that any food purchased for the canteen or kitchen is either organic, locally grown or fairtrade, it might be more expensive but it can work out healthier for your staff.

Shut down computers at night

Make it company policy to ensure that all computers and printers are completely powered off at the end of each day.  Leaving things on standby uses up unnecessary energy, which is not only bad for the environment, but costs your business money too.