Greening Business
By Robert Rosen
There is no shortage today of lawyers, accounting firms, public relations agencies, energy analysts, engineering consultants claiming to be environmental experts and offering to make your business greener. There is also a plethora of information around about how to make your business more environmentally responsible by using recycled paper, green cleaning materials, energy efficient light globes and the like. However, businesses can also take a more direct activist approach to environmental issues, often with quite rapid results.Unlike most government bureaucracies, the corporate sector is capable of adapting to changing circumstances very rapidly. Business success or even survival sometimes depends on a capacity to adapt quickly to market forces, such as changes in the supply or price of raw materials, changes in demand for products or changes in the price or quality of a competitor's product or service. While market forces often work against the broader interests of the community and the environment, they can also sometimes be effectively harnessed to positively impact on the environment.
Thus, for example, when assessing prospective suppliers of goods or raw materials it helps to let them know that their environmental performance will play an important role in your choice of a supplier. The more prospective suppliers you ask about their environmental performance, the greater will probably be the influence on their collective behaviour. If your own business is run in an environmentally responsible manner and you market your goods and services accordingly, you may also be able to influence the your competitors' attitude towards the environment, particularly if you appear to be taking market share away from them.
Your business is also in an excellent position to ask service providers such as telecommunications companies, waste management operators and even insurance companies and banks about their environmental policies. Again an effective strategy is to inform them that these matters will influence your choice of a provider of that service. Local and state government authorities involved in areas such as industrial safety, waste management, and pollution control will often react positively if you seek their assistance in making your business more environmentally responsible. It also helps to question them, where relevant, about their own environmental practices.
It can be useful to provide your customers with environmentally useful information relevant to your product or service, explaining, for example, how your product can be used in the most effective way, how the life of the product can be most effectively extended, or how it can be most efficiently reused, recycled, or disposed of, as the case may be.
Businesses can also work co-operatively with environmental organisations rather than seemingly always being at loggerheads with them. Thus Email is jointly marketing its "ozone safe" fridge with Greenpeace, and Blackmores works closely with an environment centre near its manufacturing facility in suburban Sydney .
One problem, experienced especially by very small businesses, is that just keeping your head above water and attending to the seemingly endless minutia that seem to be part of running such businesses, can seem to take up most of your time. Thus, the idea of taking an environmentally active stance with customers and suppliers, may not seem attractive. Yet such an activist approach can sometimes assist you in gaining a competitive edge. Often some consumers are prepared to pay a premium to purchase environmentally responsible products. Taking such an approach can also sometimes reduce the need to rely on conventional advertising and marketing. The Body Shop, for example, does virtually no conventional advertising, but rather, skilfully uses its environmental and social prominence and the high profile of its co- founder Anita Roddick, to gain massive free publicity. The Body Shop and other businesses such as Esprit, Patagonia and Ben and Jerry's have proven that it is possible to have a strong social and environmental conscience and still be very profitable. Profitable businesses can also afford to be a little more indulgent in their environmentally activist role and competitors are also more likely to emulate an opposition's environmentally progressive stance if that business is proving to be highly successful.
In the day to day running of any business numerous decisions are made, and actions taken, that have some environmental influence. None of these decisions or actions may, in isolation, have a very great impact. However the cumulative impact of thousands of such small actions taken by an increasingly number of businesses is a vital element in the essential transition to an ecological sustainable society.
This article originally appeared in Habitat published by the Australian Conservation Foundation
Email Robert Rosen at rrosen@geko.net.au
