Product and Service Design for Green Businesses

As you examine your business from the ground up with an eye toward building a greener, more sustainable operation, you will enter into the process of carefully analyzing each of the products or services that your company provides. As you look at each product or service through the lens of sustainability, you will begin to seek better and more sustainable product or service design—design that has the least impact on our fragile planet. This will move you into the exciting world of design for the environment, cradle-to-cradle design, and biomimicry—three relatively new ways to look at human products and services in a manner that seeks to bring the delivery of products and services more closely in line with the rules of the natural world, rather than the rules that govern the economic realm. This area is actually the heart and soul of creating a sustainable business—the fundamental examination of what your business really is and how best to operate that business. Reimagining your business can be the most exciting part of the process. We’ll examine these and other green business concepts later in this blog.

Moving your business in a greener direction is a process, a continual process that has as its central goal the profitable and productive delivery of goods and services in a manner that has the least possible harmful impacts on the world around us. As you begin this process with your own business, you will begin to reap all of the additional benefits that a greener business can provide—dramatic cost savings from reduced energy, water, and material inputs; striking reductions in waste and, perhaps, new income streams from the recycling of any remaining waste; greater employee pride, motivation, health and safety; more customer loyalty stemming from your new commitment to operating your business in a less harmful manner; greater competitive advantage in the marketplace over other less environmentally sensitive companies; and exciting new possibilities for improved product and service design.

Naturally, the costs to implement all of the various green business practices are not free. Oftentimes the initial costs may, in fact, be rather steep. Part of operating a greener business, however, is beginning to take a longer view of your business—a view that stretches farther into the future than you may be used to looking. By taking a longer view of your business and by examining the full cost of operating your business in an inefficient and less-than-green manner, you will begin to adopt a new business point of view that looks at the longer-term costs and benefits of each of your activities. Yes, it may be expensive up front to change all of your company’s lighting to all compact fluorescent lighting (or, better yet, all LED lighting), but when you look at the long-term savings—in terms of actual costs of energy use, the resulting reductions in emissions, and other very real benefits—the up-front expenses begin, in many cases, to look like real bargains. There will, of course, be many balancing acts you will have to perform. You can’t implement all of the innovative green techniques, policies, and operations at once. You will, of necessity, have to develop a long-range plan to achieve all of the various ideas that you will find in this guidebook.