Today’s business owners can be flooded with emails containing all the current buzzwords- sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon footprint, to name a few. Keeping up with the influx of information takes time and effort.
By now, you probably understand that reducing your business’s carbon footprint is essential, and you’re ready to take action! How do you get started? What emissions are most important to focus on?
Understanding your businesses’ total carbon emissions is the first step to understanding which ones are the most important to reduce. Business owners need to focus more than just the emissions they emit but also on the emissions produced in their total value chain. A business should consider the total emissions when creating their product or service. This includes emissions emitted from the manufacturing of products they purchase, the transportation emissions to and from their building, employee activity, and more. These emissions are most commonly termed, Scope 3 Emissions, and are likely to be the largest share of your carbon emissions…typically 80-90%.
Businesses can reduce carbon emissions by focusing on a few good practices
Today, we will focus on one initiative that can help reduce a business’s carbon footprint. Do you remember the three Rs- reduce, reuse, and recycle? For some reason, reuse has been in the background with little attention. But now, reuse is picking up momentum due to the environmental benefit of reducing carbon the footprint.
Businesses can reduce carbon emissions by focusing on a few good practices, including reducing waste, reusing products, recycling, and composting when possible. Out of all of these activities, there has been a surge in the use of reusables, and for good reason.
Reusables are a good return on investment
If your business purchases one-time-use products such as paper or plastic dinnerware, replacing them with reusables will reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions at their buildings and landfills. Reusables can also reduce operating costs by saving on waste transportation to and from landfills and the repeat purchase of plastic items.
Using reusable cups, plates, boxes, and shipping containers also reduces emissions at the location when trees are cut down, then later when they are shipped to the mill, and then once again when the product is shipped again to the end-user. Stopping one-time-use plastic from being manufactured also controls deforestation and erosion across the globe.
Be it a school, restaurant, or any business that purchases one-time-use plastic, the emissions produced for your purchase alone come from more than just the emissions at your place of business.
Across the world, businesses and organizations are joining the reuse movement. As businesses, cities, and states spend a lot of time and funding to offer proper recycling, now is the time to consider doing away with this complication altogether.
Reusables create the opportunity to not only reduce carbon emissions and water during the manufacturing process but also a good return on investment by doing away with the cost of repeat purchases. Reusables pay for themselves in just a few months. The average savings for small businesses is between $3000 and $22,000 per year.
We ReUse offers assistance in analyzing business’s one-time-use consumption and helping to introduce reusables as a solution that is both environmentally beneficial and financially appealing. Contact us to start a discussion on implementing reusables in your business.