We have reached a point in time where more people are making a conscious effort to reduce their waste and carbon footprint. And this includes businesses, big and small, and these businesses are attracting more customers than ever.
Want to know how you can do the same for your business? Here is how you can get started.
Use Eco-Friendly Packaging
This is the best place to start. Your packaging carries your actual product, and it’s the first thing that catches the consumer’s attention. It is possible to maintain an attractive and attention-grabbing product packaging.
You can do this even when you are using materials like eco-friendly bags, recycled paper wrappers and bioplastic bags. All these packaging materials are recyclable and eco-friendly. Cloth bags can be reused and repurchased from your clients as a loop service does.
So, both you and your customers can maximise the use of these bags. Paper wrappers can be old magazine pages, newspaper pages, or even recycled paper products. Bioplastic is actually not plastic; it’s made with plant-based products and organic resins. All these packaging options are compostable and biodegradable, so they do not remain on land and in water as plastic materials do.
Source from Local Suppliers
Getting raw materials and products for your inventory from local suppliers has a double advantage to your business: lower procurement costs and reduction in carbon footprint. And you are not the only one benefiting from this; your local suppliers and your customers can benefit from it, too.
By sourcing locally produced materials and products, your business is also helping the local industry thrive and promoting local suppliers and producers. It creates a ripple that positively affects everyone involved in the supply chain.
This is perhaps the most practical step you can take to increase revenue and reduce operating expenses while maintaining a healthy level of product inventory.
Digitise Your Files
Lastly, step into the future and do away with tape receipts and paper files whenever possible. Digitise everything that can be digitised. Bills, receipts, sales records, customer files, even your own bills for the business.
Subscribing to a cloud service to manage data storage and business transactions is a wise investment. It not only helps you reduce paper waste and clutter, but it also provides you with a more convenient way to access these files, wherever you are, whenever you need to.
If you are an online merchant, you will find this extremely beneficial to you. Digitising your files allows you to keep all your data in one place for a certain length of time. This makes storage and disposal much easier than old-school paper shredding and what not.
By changing the materials for your product package, sourcing from local suppliers, and digitising your files, you are taking huge strides towards becoming an eco-friendly business in all the right directions. These steps are completely doable and absolutely measurable.
So you can track your progress and use that information to apply the same change to other areas of your business and continue to develop ways to serve your customers in a more efficient and more eco-friendly way.
All this while minimising waste and increasing profitability on your end – truly a win-win situation.
So, go ahead and make that change. Be kinder to Mother Nature and start with these three basic areas in your business, and most importantly, start doing so now. Your customers and the planet are going to love you for it. And you will be happy about it yourself, too.
