Greening your business will provide a multiplier effect

Your work to create a more sustainable business will have a powerful ripple effect—flowing out in all directions from your enterprise—positively impacting its employees, its community, its investors, its competitors, its suppliers up the supply chain and customers down the supply chain. These effects will, in turn, influence all of those players to themselves take more positive steps toward achieving a sustainable future.

The process of greening your business is a major undertaking. It will constitute a new direction for your business and for you personally. The steps taken will take time, money, and a commitment to operating your business in a new and different manner. At the core of this process will be a reimagining of what your business really is and what, ultimately, it should be. Again, from Paul Hawken, writing in The Ecology of Commerce: “To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable . . . We must design a system . . . where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism.” But for now, at least, it will still take a conscious decision to take the first step—and the next—toward that sustainable system of commerce. Taking the action necessary to begin greening your business involves steps that anyone—in any business—can take today to make a difference in the quest for a better future.

All of us in the world of business need to understand the importance of taking these steps toward sustainability and, also, the critical urgency in taking them now. As we rapidly approach the peak of human population, the peak of oil production, and the tipping point of catastrophic climate change, the next few decades will very likely determine the future trajectory of humanity. That direction will be decided, in large part, by the combined decisions made by all of those involved in the business of the world. Each of us, as members of the world’s business community, will have few opportunities in our lifetimes to make a decision as profound, far-reaching, and fundamentally important as the one we make in deciding to take our business down the path to sustainability.