Environment and business today

Diluxshy Mariyan Eastern University Sri Lanka

Now that our world is at the edge of danger obvious to all. So each and every one has the responsibility to save our life as well as our world. What can your business do to have less of a negative impact on the environment? And how can running a green business save or make you money? Learn about sustainable development, green marketing, recycling and other business and environment topics in this article.

Yes, green marketing is a golden goose. As per J. Polonsky, green marketing can be defined as, “All activities designed to generate and facilitate any exchange intended to satisfy human needs or wants such that satisfying of these needs and wants occur with minimal detrimental input on the national environment.”

Green marketing involves developing and promoting products and services that satisfy customer’s want and need for quality, performance, affordable pricing and convenience without having a detrimental input on the environment.

Evolution of green marketing

Green marketing has evolved over a period of time. According to Peattie (2001), the evolution of green marketing has three phases. First phase was termed as “Ecological” green marketing, and during this period all marketing activities were concerned to help environment problems and provide remedies for environmental problems.

The second phase was “Environmental” green marketing and the focus shifted to clean technology that involved designing of innovative new products, which take care of pollution and waste issues. Third phase was “Sustainable” green marketing. It came into prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000.

Why green marketing?

As resources are limited and human wants are unlimited, it is important for the marketers to utilize the resources efficiently without waste as well as to achieve the organization’s objective. So green marketing is inevitable.

There is growing interest among the consumers all over the world regarding protection of environment. Worldwide evidence indicates people are concerned about the environment and are changing their behaviour.

As a result of this, green marketing has emerged which speaks for a growing market for sustainable and socially responsible products and services.

Operating a green business is not only good for the environment but good for your business’s bottom line, because conserving resources and cutting down on waste saves money. The good news is that whether you run a home-based business or an off-site enterprise, there are simple things you can do to run an environmentally friendly business.

Recycling is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of being environmentally friendly. And recycling is important. But recycling is only one part of the environmentally friendly business equation. We can also take a large step towards being more environmentally friendly by reducing the amounts of waste in our offices and business operations.

Here are just ten easy-to-implement ideas for running a green business from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s Greening Operations Guides that you can put into practice right now to make your office a more environmentally friendly place:

1. Turn off equipment when it’s not being used. This can reduce the energy used by 25 percent; turning off the computers at the end of the day can save an additional 50 percent.

2. Encourage communications by email, and read email messages on screen to determine whether it’s necessary to print them. If it’s not, don’t!

3. Reduce fax-related paper waste by using a fax-modem and by using a fax cover sheet only when necessary. Fax-modems allow documents to be sent directly from a computer, without requiring a printed hard copy.

4. Produce double-sided documents whenever possible.

5. Do not leave taps dripping, always close them tightly after use. (One drop wasted per second wastes 10,000 litres per year.)

6. Install displacement toilet dams in toilet reservoirs. Placing one or two plastic containers filled with stones [not bricks] in the toilet’s reservoir will displace about 4 litres of water per flush - a huge reduction of water use over the course of a year.

7. Find a supply of paper with maximum available recycled content.

8. Choose suppliers who take back packaging for reuse.

9. Instigate an ongoing search for “greener” products and services in the local community. The further your supplies or service providers have to travel, the more energy will be used to get them to you.

10. Before deciding whether you need to purchase new office furniture, see if your existing office furniture can be refurbished. It’s less expensive than buying new and better for the environment.

Show potential customers that you follow green business practices and you could reap more green on your bottom line. Green marketing isn’t just a motto; it’s a marketing strategy that can help you get more customers and make more money. But only if you do it right. For green marketing to be effective, you have to do three things; be genuine, educate your customers, and give them the opportunity to participate.

1. Being genuine means that a) that you are actually doing what you claim to be doing in your green marketing campaign and b) that the rest of your business policies are consistent with whatever you are doing that’s environmentally friendly. Both these conditions have to be met for your business to establish the kind of environmental credentials that will allow a green marketing campaign to succeed.

2. Educating your customers isn’t just a matter of letting people know you’re doing whatever you’re doing to protect the environment, but also a matter of letting them know why it matters. Otherwise, for a significant portion of your target market, it’s a case of “So what?” and your green marketing campaign goes nowhere.

3. Giving your customers an opportunity to participate means personalizing the benefits of your environmentally friendly actions, normally through letting the customer take part in positive environmental action.

Let’s put the three essential elements of a successful green marketing campaign together by looking at an example.

Suppose that you have decided that your business will no longer use plastic bags to wrap customer purchases. You know that the traditional plastic bag takes about one thousand years to decompose and want to do your part to stop the proliferation of plastic bags in landfills. You feel that this is the kind of environmental action that will be popular with potential customers and a good opportunity to do some green marketing.

To be genuine, you have to ensure that none of your business practices contradict your decision not to use plastic bags. What if customers who happen to walk behind your store see an overflowing trash bin filled with paper, cardboard and plastic bottles? Obviously, he or she will decide that you don’t care as much about recycling as you say you do in your green marketing.

Not using plastic bags appears to be an environmental no-brainer, but you will still need to educate your target market. Did you know that a single use plastic bag takes about one thousand years to decompose? I didn’t until I researched this article and probably a fair number of otherwise environmentally conscious people don’t either.

This one little factoid about plastic bags could be used as part of your green marketing campaign - all by itself it lets the public know why single use plastic bags are environmentally disastrous and that you and your business care about the environment. And the third element? By shopping at your store, the customer is taking action to protect the environment by preventing at least one single use plastic bag from going into a landfill.

It doesn’t sound like much, but he or she gets the satisfaction of physically doing something that fulfills their beliefs. You can also reinforce your customers’ green decisions and increase their participation by offering them additional related actions, such as buying cloth bags to use for future purchases.

Sometimes the best thing to do with a bandwagon is jump on it. You have to walk the talk and actually implement green policies and act in environmentally friendly ways for green marketing to work, but if you do, you’ve got a powerful selling point with those who are environmentally conscious and want to act to make the world a greener place - a market that’s growing exponentially right now.

You can find out more about running an environment friendly business in my article, being good to the environment is good for business. Environment friendly actions don’t have to be large to have an impact.

Consistently reducing the amount of energy, water, and paper our businesses use can make a huge difference, both to the environment and to our pocketbooks. How much paper would you save over the course of a year, for instance, if you always ran double sided copies? A small thing - but a big result!