Saving money by going green

Posted June 12 2010

There is one thing that many business owners have in common. They’re incredibly busy people and their first priority is to look after their customers and the bottom line. Caught up in daily management, many of them feel that they're too busy to help the environment in their day-to day operations.
 
To me, this makes no sense. As someone who’s been running businesses for over 20 years, I’ve always been surprised as to how ineffective many businesses are in reducing their environmental impact. To me it’s common business sense. After all, doing more with less and improving your environmental efficiency is a great way to boost your bottom line.
 
In researching my new book ‘Sustainable Growth’, I talked to many business owners about this lack of action. What I found was a real willingness to act, but a situation where businesses lacked the confidence to move forward. In many situations, businesses didn’t understand the very basics of environmental management. They simply don’t know where to begin.
 
What concerned me most was that many business owners were totally unaware of how much money could be saved by taking environmentally positive actions in their business. Saving energy, using less resources and finding new ways to do more with less sounds like common sense business strategy. So why aren’t more Australian businesses ‘walking the talk’ on the environment?
 
For those businesses who’ve yet to take their first environmental steps, we’re moving to a stage where they may have no choice. Research shows that the public expect business to become more sustainable. They want companies to ‘green up’ the goods that they sell. As business sustainability gathers momentum across the world, Australian SMEs are also discovering that companies with a strong environmental stance prefer doing business with like-minded companies. That’s why understanding sustainability has become a vital part of continuous business development.
 
Major overseas companies like Marks & Spencer and Walmart have very proactive sustainable procurement policies. These companies are proactively engaging suppliers by asking them direct questions about how they’re reducing the environmental impact of the goods and services that they supply. Failure to act on environmental issues could undermine the ability of suppliers to engage and sell to such companies.
 
When one looks at the state of today’s world, one can see that we cannot sustain a ‘business as usual’ approach. In 1950, global population stood at 2.55 billion people. In 2010 it is more than 6.8 billion and by 2020 it is estimated that it will exceed 7.6 billion. As the world’s population increases and consumerism continues to grow, the demand for the planet’s limited resources will also increase.
 
The 1950s signalled the beginning of a consumer spending boom that started in the USA and quickly spread across the globe. This consumer-led boom generated major improvements in the quality of people’s lives but it also changed the way we interacted with, and impacted on, the environment.
 
Today, it means that the world is living on ‘environmental credit’. At some point, future generations are going to have to pay a price for the over use of our natural resources. Indeed, our current use of oil could also lead to us running out of easily accessible fuel. That will have a very significant impact on our economy, as well as our quality of life.
 
This is the only planet we’ve got and as businesses, we can play a key role in making sustainable use of the resources that it gives us. A failure to do so is a failure of common business sense.
 
For the modern and efficient business it’s not a case of having a successful company OR a healthy environment. In a truly sustainable world, we must have both.

You can follow Jon on Twitter via @ jondeeoz

Thanks to Sensis, you can order a free copy of Jon's ‘Sustainable Growth’ book from here.