Your organization is eco-conscious: your space is LEED certified, your employees use green benefits and you recycle everything. But…what about the services your organization provides or the products it creates? To be green to the core, you cannot afford to ignore these initiatives toward a greener workplace:
Evaluate Your Product or Service Lifecycle
Consider the entire lifecycle of your products or services, from extraction to distribution and consumption to waste. The goal is to be green through and through, not just during one phase of development. Pioneer good products or services, rather than less bad ones.
Improve Your Processes
When assessing your carbon footprint, look beyond your four walls to the complete cycle of your product or service, including third-party vendors, suppliers and customers. If you produce a product that a customer purchases only to use and release a ton of CO2 emissions, is it a green product, even if it was sustainably manufactured? Of course, the answer is no.
Employ an Eco-Insider
Consider hiring or contracting with someone to help you navigate the environmental maze. The category has a variety of titles: environmental expert, renewable energy engineer, heath and safety advisor, to name a few. To learn more, simply type “environment” into major recruitment sites or hire a recruitment agency that specializes in the field.
Offset What’s Left
You still need some paper. And you need to travel sometimes. Consider making a donation to the earth in the name of that flight you took last week. You can purchase carbon offset credits for those unavoidable business practices that are less than environmentally friendly. By analyzing your product and service lifecycles and processes, hiring an expert and offsetting the things you can’t avoid, your organization will go beyond the surface — ensuring you’re green throughout.
Continue working toward a greener workplace. In case you missed it, click to read Part 1 and Part 2.