Sustainability is increasingly becoming a subject of interest and importance within community groups across the world. With global warming becoming more of an issue, green initiatives are starting to pop up everywhere to help reduce the damage societies have done to our planet. What can we do to help reduce our impact on the environment and go green?

There are many steps all of us as people or as a business can take to reduce our carbon footprint; some of these are small, easy steps such as recycling, reducing waste or cutting back on energy use, and some can be extremely large, like changing commuting behavior. Thinking about our carbon footprint today will help with our environmental actions tomorrow and beyond.

Here, we focus on 5 easy to start long term green initiatives, so anyone or any business can reduce their usage to help boost sustainability.

Bottled Water

San Francisco made headlines, when they implemented a city-wide bottled water ban. While a city-wide ban wouldn’t qualify under a sustainable, “easy to start green initiative”, this can be an easy one for your company or organization to do. Bottled water creates an incredible amount of waste that has a large impact on our planet. By removing bottled water from your shelves and vending machines, you’ll make a large impact in the fight to be green. On top of that, it’s really not difficult for people to fill up their water bottles or drink from fountains.

For more information on how to go green with water foundations, check out this video to learn more about how bottled water affects our environmental impact, and how bottled water isn’t necessarily cleaner or healthier than tap water. 

Computer Power

Many companies need the help of computers to run their businesses. Depending on how many computers they have, this can be a large drain on energy resources. To go green, make sure you have a business policy to shut down any computers that are not in use or utilize a power management software such as NightWatchman or Greentrac. This is one of the easiest green initiatives you can start while saving on your energy bill.

Xplor Recreation has functions for your business facility to automate lighting to turn off or on at certain hours! Learn more about how this can help save you money and energy in the long run.

Measure your Baseline

It’s hard to reduce something you don’t measure first. Know the kind of impact you have by measuring your company's environmental impact. While this may sound expensive, there are many free eco-friendly tools out there to determine your ecological baseline. Once you have the information, you can then determine where you have the biggest potential for change with your green initiative, and see where you’re doing well. Aim to tackle the biggest trash sources first, then go down the list.

RELATED: 3 Ways to Educate Your Community on Conservation

Commuting Incentives

Providing work incentives for commuting can be a wonderful green initiative change how some people get to work. Driving to work can be quite wasteful, especially if everyone drives their own cars instead of carpooling. Provide a breakdown of green incentives depending on how sustainable they’re being. For example, carpooling, public transit and cycling are all great options, but it might make more sense for cycling to have a higher reward than carpooling. What should the incentives be? This depends largely on your business's resources, your team’s culture, etc. Play around to see what motivates your team members to change their lifestyle and go green.

Our personal favorite incentive comes from Yahoo: their co-founders promised to sumo wrestle each other if their employees collectively reduced their non-renewable resources by 20%.

Green Customers

There are many ways you can incentivize your customers to help reduce waste for the long term go green. Providing vouchers, whether it’s for a discount or a free lesson, for your eco-friendly customers is a great idea. This can not only help reduce waste but it can also foster loyalty for consumers with environmental concerns which can, in turn, increase profits beyond the costs of the incentive program. It’s a win-win green initiative! Helping your customers go green can also include paperless billing, using less energy, automations, more convenient recycling, and digitizing other aspects of your interactions.

Small businesses too can noticeably lower overhead, with the right sustainable, green initiatives. What are the most ingenious green initiatives you’ve seen lately to save on waste, energy use, or anything else? Learn more about how Xplor Recreation is leading the way on green initiatives for enterprises or contact one of our specialists to see how your business can cut costs, while improving your community.