Sustainability is becoming more and more important to businesses in recent years. As more and more people begin to think seriously about how to mitigate the effects of climate change, we are seeing a great deal of trends appearing in the business world that are focused on making business greener.
One of the biggest things that businesses are concerning themselves with is the carbon footprint of their work. We’ve noticed a huge shift in the kind of IT Support for Small Business Solutions that take into consideration the trend of using more ‘green’ technology. Companies who provide IT Support Businesses use have started to notice their impacts. This refers to the overall greenhouse emissions of an individual, organisation, or event. A wide range of activity can contribute to a carbon footprint, both indirectly and directly.
So, what are some of the sustainability trends happening in the business world?
Lower & Responsible Energy Consumption
A big effect on a businesses carbon footprint is the amount of energy consumption they have. Primarily, businesses will consume energy through the use of various technologies that require electricity. For a small business, this would encompass office lights, heating, running water, the use of PCs, laptops, televisions, and peripherals such as printers & scanners. Larger businesses will have all of this, but potentially multiplied due to having several sights; and may even have factories with heavy and specialised machinery that consume lots of energy.
There are many ways in which businesses can reduce their energy consumption, as well as making their energy consumption more environmentally friendly. Ensuring that all equipment is energy efficient makes a big difference – if you have 50 employees using PCs and laptops that have inefficient power consumption, this will result in a lot of energy wastage. Many modern computers, laptops, and mobile devices are incredibly energy efficient, or else have special settings that make them more energy efficient.
Additionally, picking an energy provider (such as Bulb or Octopus) that only uses renewable energy sources, is a good way of reducing the carbon footprint of your energy usage.
AI & Cloud Technology
The amount of data that is produced by a company everyday is astounding, and the value of that data is often overlooked because it is so dense and may seem pointless. However, when you collect all of that aggregate data and apply machine learning that can analyse it on a deep level, you can draw some very valuable insights from the data. This principle can be used to help a business gain detailed insights on the environmental impact of their work.
Services such as Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability do just this, and so much more. Most IT Support Partners will have a Microsoft 365 Consultant Team to help with unique queries and requests. The benefit of using cloud services include being able to collect data from multiple physical sites and store them centrally, enabling you to utilize data from all across your business. Additionally, Cloud Technology also reduces reliance on physical hardware, which as previously mentioned, can increase energy consumption.
Carbon Offsetting
With Carbon Footprints being of huge concern to business, a big trend has been the practice of offsetting, neutralising, or even exceeding the amount of greenhouse emissions one creates, with actions that help to reduce greenhouse emissions. A simple example is for every tree that gets cut down, a new tree of planted elsewhere (or 2 trees, or even a hundred trees).
The minimum goal is to reduce the overall amount of greenhouse emissions, and the maximum goal is to be taking more greenhouse emissions out of the atmosphere than is being added. This can be done in many ways – such as the aforementioned reforestation approach, investment in renewable energy, afforestation (creating brand new forests), and the safe disposal of pollutants.
