Many city based businesses such as a web design company are using the fact that they follow sustainability guidelines in their offices as a marketing angle in the hope of attracting like minded clients. In fact, they are successful at this in most cases, since people now realise the importance of doing their small bit to help save the earth’s resources by reducing their carbon footprint.

Such practices don’t even take much effort and many actually save you money, so it’s worthwhile to find out what you can do and implementing some, if not all the strategies. For instance, if your small office needs a new printer, you might consider getting one that will do more than one job. Or you might want to look at the specifications to see whether there is a toner or ink saver mode.

If all offices were to do this, the whole mounts up and saves in several ways –

• The business saves on the cost of ink or toner
• Using a multifunction printer can save on space in the office
• There is less rubbish going into landfill
• There are fewer resources being used to replace products and accessories.

Another way to save is simply to make sure you choose a printer – or other product – that is suitable for your output. If you choose a cheap printer that is slow to print one page, the power used in printing is excessive when you need to have at least 20 pages printed in a day. But if your printer’s output is 20 pages per minute, the device is only working for one minute – unless you want more pages than that.

Besides which, getting 20 pages per minute printed means a big saving in time and an increase in efficiency for your office as against waiting for 20 minutes for the same amount of pages.  Not to mention if your output is greater, waiting for all those printing jobs to get done becomes an exercise in frustration and lost productivity.

So again, using sustainable practices not only helps the earth’s resources in a general way, it saves your business costs and increases efficiency in a specific, measureable way. That always has to be a good thing, especially since small businesses don’t usually have a large budget and certainly nothing to waste.

Small businesses can be proud of the fact that they use sustainable practices in these and other ways. It is well-known that they are the backbone of Australia, and that when some start doing it others will soon join them because of the savings in time and cost and the increase in efficiency. Not to mention how they can then use the fact as a way to get even more customers who also understand the benefits of using sustainable practices wherever they can.