Small Businesses Can also Participate in Earth Day 2019

Sustainable practices and policies have been shown to benefit small businesses and the communities where they’re located.

They attract supportive patrons – especially millennials – and improve their bottom lines.

Consequently, small business owners should prepare to participate in Earth Day 2019, which will be Monday, April 22.

What was celebrated as a funky college happening in 1970, led by flower children in multi-colored VW beetles, has evolved into an earnest global campaign to preserve the environment for future generations.

Earth Day is the focal day of a lifelong process that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s endangered natural environment. The day was spawned by an outcry against a massive oil spill in waters near Santa Barbara, CA, in 1969. That year at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace.

This concept was later sanctioned in a proclamation written by McConnell and signed by UN Secretary General U Thant. Subsequently a separate Earth Day was founded by the late US Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970. While the maiden April 22 Earth Day focused on the United States, an movement launched by Denis Hayes, the original national coordinator in 1970, took it around the world in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations.

Since then the observance has attracted the participation of more than 1 billion people in more than 190 countries, making their stand on behalf of our natural surroundings. It has evolved beyond politics or partisan bickering.

Earth Day has matured along with many of us over the past near 50 years. Successful events nowadays include large and small businesses.

Here are some ideas for your business. You’re not too small or large to participate and no event is insignificant. These suggestions also build employee spirit and raise awareness about sustainability.

Engage Employees:  Ask a Provocative Question

Earth Day is the perfect time to engage employees and raise awareness of your green values.  A first step is to help employees get in touch with their values and why sustainability and protecting the earth is important to them personally.  Last year for Earth Day, University of San Francisco had faculty, staff and students answer one of two questions on white boards:  I love the Earth Because… or I take action for the Earth when I… 

Kick the Bottled Water Habit

Is your company walking the talk when it comes to using bottled water?  This is an easy place to make a tangible, visible difference.  Work with the powers that be to eliminate bottled water at the office, events and meetings.  Companies that have reduced their use of bottled water, save money by using filtered water machines and reusable containers.

Plant a Tree outside Your Office

Earth Day is a great opportunity to add some greenery to your storefront, business location and community. Get your staff together to plant a tree and discuss how trees improve air quality and improve the planet’s ecosystems.

Clean Up a Local Park

You could also get a team together to pick up trash at a local park or outdoor area. In addition to reducing pollution, this can also serve as a team building activity for your environmentally conscious employees. You might even invite some partners and top clients to join you in the effort.

Volunteer with Others

There are many environmental non-profits and sustainable businesses around the Garden State that are likely to organize their own clean-up and greening efforts around Earth Day. You and your team could volunteer to support their mission on the holiday to get involved and network with other community members.

Start a Rooftop Garden

At your office building, you can add some greenery by starting a garden on your roof or even just using planters along your window sills. Grow herbs and vegetables to stock your kitchen with fresh and organic produce.

Add Plants to Your Office

You can also simply add some potted plants around your workspace. Many of these plants can improve indoor air quality and provide a number of other benefits. So use Earth Day as an opportunity to invite your whole team to bring in their favorite plants.

Create a Printer Policy

A printer policy, which could specify the instances where employees are allowed to print hard copies of documents and when they should opt for just digital copies instead. Use Earth Day as an opportunity to introduce this policy and explain the environmental benefits of cutting down on paper usage.

Purchase Recycled Paper

Is your company or organization still purchasing virgin paper (paper with no recycled content) for the office?  Take a moment to work with your procurement folks to phase out the use of virgin paper and adopt a minimum standard of 30% post-consumer waste (PCW) recycled content for all office supplies.  Better yet go for 100%.  UCSF was just able to negotiate a price for 100% PCW that is cheaper than virgin and 30%.

Choosing recycled paper has a multitude of environmental benefits, including a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and protection of biodiversity and native forests.  If you implement the double-side copying, typically you can save enough to offset any additional cost of 100% recycled paper.

Zero Print Day

Otherwise, you might even take a ceremonial stance on paper use, instituting a paperless day for all of Earth Day, where no one prints or copies anything. It might even make you and your team realize just how much you can accomplish without using paper.

Install Light Timers

Electricity use is another area where you can potentially make your business greener throughout the year. On Earth Day, you can mark the occasion by installing timers on the lights so that they automatically turn off if they don’t sense movement in a room for a lengthy period of time.

Replace All Your Light Bulbs

If you haven’t already, you can also use the holiday as an opportunity to replace the lightbulbs throughout your office, store or restaurant with energy-efficient LED bulbs, which don’t need to be replaced as often and use electricity.

Install Faucet Aerators

An easy and low-cost way to conserve water is to install faucet aerators for every sink in your work area. Most faucets have a water flow ranging from 4 gallons per minute (gpm) to 6 gpm. By installing a high efficiency aerator, this can be reduced to either 1 gpm or 1.5 gpm, saving thousands of gallons of water per year.

Start a Carpool

You can also get employees involved in the Earth Day fun by starting a carpool where team members can sign up to drive into work with others who live nearby on certain days. Even if you can get some people to drive in together one day a week, you can decrease the amount of air pollution and fuel usage in your area.

Let Employees Telecommute

Or you could take a different approach and simply let employees telecommute on Earth Day so that no one has to make that trek out to the office. If it works out, you might even consider instituting a telecommute day each week or month.

Replace Disposable Dishes

Another environmental approach could be to revamp your office kitchen. In honor of the day, ask your team to bring in a mug or two from home so that you can dump the Styrofoam cups. Then invest in some washable plates, bowls and cups so you can stop stocking the kitchen with disposable kitchenware.

Collect Recyclables from Customers

If you have a store or other business that customers can actually visit, put up signs leading up to Earth Day encouraging customers to bring in items that might be difficult to recycle, like batteries and electronics. Then bring those items to a recycling center or electronics company that can refurbish them.

Send Out a Green Message on Social Media

Engaging customers, partners and your suppliers in your environmental efforts can be a great way to involve even more people in the Earth Day fun. You can share your company’s environmental initiative and offer an easy suggestions for your followers to get involved in their own way.

Make a Donation

You could also contribute to environmental causes financially. Give your employees an opportunity to contribute throughout the day and then make a major contribution to your environmental organization of choice at the end of the day.

Set Out a Donation Jar

Or you could even get your customers involved by setting out a donation jar near your cash register to support a local environmental group. Then make sure that you share the donation you made with their contributions on Earth Day.

Download Eco-Friendly Apps

There are plenty of mobile apps out there that can help your business decrease its carbon footprint, from those that decrease junk mail to some that can make virtual work or meetings possible. For Earth Day, have a meeting where your team can share all of their favorite green apps and then encourage everyone to download their favorites.

Create a ‘Green Team’ of Employees

Another way to get your employees aware and involved would be to create a specific team dedicated to making the workplace more energy efficient. Host an Earth Day meeting where you ask for volunteers and then allow the team to make periodic suggestions to you for improvements to make around the office.

Set Up a Pledge Board

You can also get the whole team involved by setting up a pledge board asking what each person plans on doing to help the environment on Earth Day and beyond.

Write to Your Representatives

Finally, you can give your team the opportunity to write to their elected officials in Washington and Trenton telling them about your efforts and asking them to support the environmental causes that are close to their hearts. You don’t need to push a particular cause, but maybe hold a meeting where you share some information about a few different options, then allow people the option to compose their own letters.

While you’re at it, tell your local news media about your plans. Extra publicity for the cause and your small business can’t hurt.

After you’ve done even a few of these points, you should contact the New Jersey Sustainable Business Registry and inquire about meeting its criteria for joining the list of sustainable small businesses. Contact NJSBinfo@NJSBDC.com. An experienced sustainability consultant will be happy to speak with you in person, on-line, or by phone. You can also find out more about these programs by visiting the Sustainability Consulting page on NJSBDC’s website (http://www.njsbdc.com/sustainability-consulting/).