Business Reply are proud to be using certain green business practices – saving energy is the responsibility of all businesses even SME’s.
It is often argued that SME’s cannot always compete with larger companies on ‘green’ issues and that it is expensive to use energy reducing practices within small businesses. That doesn’t have to be the case and indeed it can often be just small changes that can make a difference. The FSB recently reported that “Small businesses must be protected by electricity market safeguards to prevent energy bills from escalating further”. As spiraling energy costs can make a difference to operating costs this is important although it’s just as important to save costs in other ways, too. And SME’s can save money and increase their ‘green’ credentials at the same time.
So what green business practices do we use at Business Reply?
We use a green supplier for our power supply – Ecotricity who use 67.5% renewable fuel sources and invest heavily in new sources of eco power they have a simple tariff for SME’s to make it easier to work out costs. Ecotricity also plants trees and creates ecoparks as well as working with agricultural companies to offer electric powered tractors!
Where possible we like to use dial in support methods for till servicing – we decided some years ago that this was a much better option for clients and for saving energy. Clients issues on their EPoS tills can be dealt with more quickly and ironed out efficiently with speed. It’s a winner all round as clients can be back reassured even if it’s a small issue on the till without waiting for a call out or engineer to attend site. And for us we save miles and energy without making a visit – and we still stay in contact with clients.
We are happy to accept accounts paperwork via email and BACS payments and we also issue e- statements, e-invoices and allow many non paper payment options. In the office we turn off lights, monitors and powered appliances where we can and store paperwork electronically to reduce paper usage. We use low wattage bulbs and car share on our journey to work. We recycle as much as possible and keep our lunchtime apple cores and banana skins for our compost bin at home.
There was an interesting feature recently asking for ideas on twitter and Business Reply were happy to quote on some small ideas to help save energy for SME’s.
