How Technology Helps Businesses be Green

Happy Earth Day! The annual holiday serves as a celebration of eco-friendly innovation in the world, and a reminder of the importance of being green—for business owners, this is especially important! As key members of our community, we need to be especially aware of our ecological footprint; not only is it better for our own sake and the environment’s, but it helps establish our businesses as leaders and world-conscious pioneers! Technology has helped us achieve that, and continues to foster green attitudes in the world of business.

 Look at your office environment, your school or even your home—you might be surprised at how much clutter you’re preventing just by using your computer for everyday communication and financial transactions! Not only are you saving desk space by avoiding the consumption of paper in most of your tasks, you’re cutting down your own impact on the environment. It may seem very slight, but when the world transitioned over to the cloud and other online services, it greatly declined the need for (and waste of) traditional packaging, letters, promotions, bank statements… you name it!

As for the appliances and technology you use in your business itself, what products you decide on really do make a difference. Think about what you use to cool down or warm up the office, what kinds of lights you’re using and the waste disposal system you have in place—do you recycle or use standard trash bins? Thermostats like the Nest are geared toward keeping your office space comfortable when you need it, but not overdoing it with too-cold or too-warm settings and inflexibility when you want to change something. Energy-efficient light bulbs burn cooler and require less energy to operate—a win-win! These are just some examples of the strides technology has taken in keeping up with the needs of the environment.

And think of all the paper you’re saving when you switch over to cloud storage for your business. Again, it probably doesn’t seem like a lot in relation to the rest of the world, but it is tiny individual steps that really add up.

In what ways do you implement green practices at work? The tech industry has made it easy—we just need to put them in place! Let’s think about what we’ve accomplished and how we can improve this Earth Day.