Paper cups and plates with green leaves growing out of them.

Your environmental management practices may not only benefit the environment but also your business’s reputation, sales of your product or services and your ability to attract staff.

There are many small actions you can take to reduce your environmental impact. We’ve put together 4 actions that you can take in 30 minutes or less!

Define your business values

It’s important to have a clear set of values to guide you on your environmental and sustainability journey.

Defining your values will allow you to have something to measure your decisions and current practices against. It also ensures that everyone in your business has agreed on and understood the business’s values so you can all work towards the same goal.

Review your suppliers

Conducting a review of your suppliers is a great first step to reduce your environmental impact. You can assess each supplier against these questions:

  • What materials does the supplier use? Are they sustainable, renewable or recycled?
  • How does the supplier manage their waste?
  • Is the supplier transparent about their environmental practices?
  • Does the supplier align with our business sustainability goals?

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you can set up a time to talk to your suppliers about their practices. If they don’t already, your supplier may be open to talking about using environmentally friendly products, materials, practices or services.

Alternatively, you may want to research new suppliers you could use that already have implemented environmentally friendly practices.

Involve your employees

Your environmental efforts will go a long way if everyone is involved, including your employees. Spend some time brainstorming ways you could get your employees involved.

Some examples to get you thinking include:

  • start a recycling competition
  • run training on environmental and sustainability practices
  • provide a suggestion box for your staff to provide their ideas on what the business could do to improve environmental and sustainability practices
  • raise awareness through an email campaign.

There’s plenty of opportunities to involve your employees in ways that suit your business!

Network and collaborate

Networking is a great way to meet and learn from other business owners. You can quickly search online to see if there are any local environment groups or business meet ups that you could attend.

When networking with other businesses you can learn what actions others have taken to reduce their environmental impact. It may even open up opportunities to collaborate and reach new customers.

Ready to take more action?

If you've got more than 30 minutes to look into your environmental and sustainability efforts, we have more information on how to manage your:

  • environmental impact
  • business waste
  • water usage
  • energy usage
  • sustainability efforts. 
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