9 ways to make your startup more environmentally sustainable

Photo credit: Pixabay.

In case you hadn’t noticed, things have been getting a little hot around here lately. The most recent indication (assuming you don’t live near any of the fires, flooding, or other increasingly frequent climate disasters) is that last month, July, was the hottest month since we starting tracking and averaging global temperatures back in 1880.

Of course, it’s not all about warming. Our carbon emissions have a wide variety of effects you might not even be aware of. For example: acidifying the oceans, which poses a serious threat to everything from our seafood supplies in the short term to our ability to breathe in the long term (about half of our oxygen is produced by phytoplankton who are sensitive to changes in ocean pH).

The bad news is that humans cannot stop this. That ship has sailed, probably decades ago. But we can try to slow it down, and reduce our own footprints in the hopes that the new world we’re creating won’t be as nightmarish as the worst-case-scenarios predict.

The best news: if you run a startup, there’s actually a lot you can do to reduce your company’s footprint. Some of these things are big changes, and others not so big. But you don’t have to embrace all of them at once. The important thing is to start somewhere.

Photo credit: StockUnlimited.

1. Encourage telecommuting

The office has been a staple of the workplace for decades, but it can be terrible for the environment, especially if many of your employees are driving their own cars to and from work. That kind of commute increases the CO2 emissions your company is causing, and it can also increases employee stress levels if you work in a city with traffic problems (and who doesn’t?).

You can eliminate those emissions entirely by asking your workers to stay home and complete their work via the web. While there are some things that simply can’t be done over the internet, the list of those things is getting shorter and shorter. And even if you can’t convert your company to telecommuting exclusively, you can almost certainly cut down on the number of days a week everybody has to be in the office. You don’t have to go full telecommute – every single car trip you can eliminate is better than nothing.

(There are a lot of other advantages to telecommuting, too, but that’s outside the scope of this piece.)

2. Encourage green commuting

Sometimes, you just need people to be in the office. That’s OK; there are still ways you can make that less environmentally impactful. Provide incentives for workers to take public transportation or (if they live close enough) walk or bike to work. These incentives don’t have to be financial. I realize that most startups don’t have much money to spare. But even a simple thing like saying bike commuters are allowed to come in a half-hour later could help encourage more of your employees to change the way they commute.

Another idea: organize a car-sharing system so that employees who do drive their cars to work aren’t always coming in separate cars when they could all fit into one or two together.

Pick me up. Photo credit: Pixabay.

3. Rent a smaller office

4. Be conservative with heat and AC

5. Recycle properly

6. Use green web hosting

7. Eliminate plastic bottles and paper cups

8. Serve sustainable snacks

9. Partner with eco-friendly companies