Reduce your Use, Reduce your Costs

Such a large part of where sustainability keeps ending up seemingly at odds with business is the trade offs. "Sure," management thinks, "we could invest resources in sustainability initiatives, but that would mean we were diverting them from some other value (and probably revenue) creating activities."

But business cases are starting to be made - actually many business cases - where sustainability is not "taking a bite" out of the company pie, it's adding ingredients and taking us from an 8" to a 12" pie pan! Yum!


One of the major areas where we see this clear mutual benefit has been in reducing the amount of packaging used in normal operations. Not only does this reduce the amount of plastics and other packaging materials littering the Earth after use, but companies are paying for packaging! So reducing packaging reduces costs.

A new study by As You Sow and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows that major Brands Waste $11.4B per year because of bad policies surrounding packaging (read more: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/02/02/132669/). While many of these Brands represent the food and beverage industry, consumer packaged goods, apparel, and other industries can experience massive benefits from reconsidering how they treat packaging in their business.

Sustainability-minded yoga and rock climbing lifestyle fashion brand prAna has saved more than 4.5 million plastic bags from going to landfill, which is 31,000 pounds of plastic and over 1.85 billion BTUs of energy, by taking over 50% of their product line poly bag free in 2012. (Read more: http://www.prana.com/life/2014/08/10/prana-polybag-project-update/)

And global giant Unilever sent zero waste to landfill (goal for 2015), in turn reporting that this action saved them over $226 million and created hundreds of jobs. (More: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/02/02/unilever-sends-zero-waste-to-landfill-saves-226m/)

It's stories like this that give us hope for more immediate change. Savings for your business while saving the planet - hopefully in the next couple years become a no-brainer so we can push for other important but less "balance sheet obvious" ideas.

Regardless of who you are, all these companies who have experienced success in reducing environmental waste and operational costs through reducing packaging got one thing: this is real, it is happening, and you can benefit any time you want by making a change. Remember the waste hierarchy:


It is easy to always think of recycling as the greenest option in the movement, but are there ways we can use less, use again, or not use at all?

No one expects the next big technology breakthrough (Twitter, cloud services, self-parking cars, bullet trains) to come from sticking to "business as usual", why do we think we can get away with treating operational activities like packaging that way? Innovate! Who knows? You might just save money and save the world at the same time.