Understanding Why Your Company Should Go Green ............................
A 2006 Sierra Club poll showed that the proportion of Americans who worry
about the environment “a great deal” or “a fair amount” has jumped from
62 to 77 percent. Environmentalism, in other words, is on everyone’s radar.
As such, the choice for today’s companies doesn’t simply lie between the
extremes of the far-out tree hugger who chains himself to a redwood tree, on
the one hand, or, on the other, to falling into a bottomless abyss of paranoid
anxiety about impending lawsuits.
The speed with which information travels is another factor that is sobering
companies into going green. By the time a company finds out about an envi-
ronmental problem, the news about that problem may have already spread
around the world. Pick up a magazine or newspaper, and on any given day
you’re likely to see reports about green successes or failures. Green is news,
and news travels faster than ever.
Going green is literally everywhere. We could easily compare the current shift
toward enhanced environmental awareness to the events that resulted from
the dot.com boom of the early to mid-90s. Just as it was news then to have
a Web site, or even brochureware, so, too, is it news to be green now. Of
course, this won’t always hold true. Trends become fads, and fads eventually
become norms. For smart businesses, however — that is, for businesses that
go green proactively now — some nice press for being an environmental
pioneer is just one of the benefits.
The fact is, lots of companies used to go green because they had to, either by
law or as a last-ditch effort to improve their public image. Now, however,
those same companies have found that reducing pollutants and wasteful
practices also contributes to the increased efficiency of internal processes.
All of this — need we spell it out? — creates a positive impact on the bottom
line. Companies can profit substantially from going green!
Just listen to Sir Richard Branson, the mogul king sitting at the top of the
Virgin empire. “I believe we need to make a virtue out of investing in clean
technology and renewable energy,” he said in an interview for Saab’s Web
site (www.saabbiopower.co.uk/), “and not be ashamed to want to make
profits out of it. For too long, environmentally friendly technology and issues
about the environment have been seen as a corporate social responsibility
issue and not an opportunity to create new wealth in the future. Governments
alone cannot solve the problems we face unless the capitalist world invests in
a sustainable future.”
162 Part III: Going Green
