COP26 is a reminder that our planet is fragile, and the actions we take now will impact the world tomorrow, for our children and our children’s children.
We are a small business in our first year, but that alone doesn’t excuse us from thinking about our environmental impact. So one of the most important factors we considered when developing our digital marketing agency was ensuring our impact on the environment was minimal.
So when we were planning our business, we put in place several processes that would help us towards our goals of becoming more environmentally friendly. We aimed to minimise our usage of non-recyclable materials, keep energy usage to an absolute minimum and avoid using large amounts of paper. Some of the measures we employed include:
Marketing materials – Every piece of marketing material we have ever produced has been multi-use or 100% recyclable. We served coffee in reusable travel mugs at recent events, steering clear of the usual go-to giveaways of plastic pens/stress balls and other pointless stuff that ends in a landfill.
Flipcharts are banned! We don’t use flipcharts, and using post-it notes is discouraged (an agency favourite). Instead, we have painted all of our walls in writable paint, which can easily be wiped clean to save our reliance on paper.
Printing – All of our contracts are sent digitally via DocuSign; we also use Quickbooks (which our accountant was delighted about!). In most cases, we view content on our screens and avoid printing it off. Our printer hasn’t worked for four weeks, and nobody has noticed!
Recycling – We recycle everything we can; every week, we sort through our rubbish, ensuring if something can be recycled, it is. This means in an average week; our waste amounts to a small 15l bag. A large volume of our desks/chairs/IT equipment was purchased second hand.
IT Equipment – Is switched off each evening (including monitors), ensuring minimal electricity wastage.
Heating – We only switch this on when necessary. Instead, we wear jumpers/coats, but if it gets to the point where we might need gloves, then we switch it on!
In areas taking the steps above have increased our first-year costs, our savings elsewhere have offset this on things like heating/electricity and paper. We know we need to do more, and we will. But we thought that sharing this article with some of the things we do to keep our environmental impact to an absolute minimum would help other start-ups and smaller businesses with the same. Whilst some of the above may not be feasible for other companies (we have the advantage that we are a digital marketing agency), just making a few minor changes to how you do things or operate could make a huge difference.
If you have any tips or tricks of your own that may help us in our quest to be as environmental as possible, then please let us know.