Improving the Environmental Leg

The environmental leg of the three legged stool is, to some, the easiest and most obvious side thought of when it comes to sustainable business. This is, after all, the side immediately thought of when one thinks of sustainability.

So how does a business go about starting down the environmental leg path? Low hanging fruit. The easy steps come first - changing light bulbs, paper efficiency, turning off non-use lights when no one is around, change to water efficient plumbing (sinks, toilets, faucets) etc. These things are easy to do and very afforable for businesses.

But what to do with that saved money?

Put it in a new account labeled 'sustainable changes' or something like it.

The larger changes take money. They are expensive. A solar panel array, wind turbine, re-planting natural plants and reducing blacktop outside, heating and cooling system re-vamps, material selection, machine and electronics upgraded to lower using energy models. All those take more money than a pack of light bulbs.

Yet every penny saved in the beginning gets re-invested into larger changes, so in the future that once expensive turbine is now purchased with money that would have been spent already on previous expenses.

Eventually all these changes makes the business money because the costs that were once there and seen as fixed costs no longer exist.

See how easy that is?

But it's not an over-night change. Becoming sustainable takes time, effort, and money. Not all businesses can do that. So be wary of businesses that claim they are now sustainable when just last week the paper reported their failing in, say, energy use.