6 Environmentally Friendly Business Practices Your Brand Should Consider

Julie Starr • December 11, 2020



Business owners are being challenged by public opinions and global legislative changes to practice environmentally friendly business cultures. As a result, the commercial viability of your company may depend on green transformation. In fact, 58% of customers are more likely to follow a brand if they know that the organization cares for the environment. Are you looking forward to embracing eco-friendly business development strategies but don’t know where to start? Here are five environmentally friendly business practices you should consider.

  • Practice green procurement

A simple way to adopt an environmentally friendly business culture is to practice green procurement. Consider your suppliers and find out who produces their goods sustainably. Order recyclable supplies that don’t contain substances that are potentially toxic to the environment. You can also decide to cut ties with suppliers who excessively package their goods with tons of plastic and other materials that aren’t eco-friendly. If you’re a procurement manager, it is smart to be mindful of your suppliers and their goods to screen for sustainable business partners. 

  • Use eco-friendly cleaning solutions

Traditional cleaning solutions may release toxic chemicals into the environment. These can also affect your employees’ health and hurt the planet. Conventional cleaning solutions can cause pollution in your business environment. Switching to eco-friendly cleaning products could place your organization on a straight path to success. Greener cleaning products can minimize air and water pollution and lower the risks of climate change and ozone layer depletion. By using environmentally friendly cleaning chemicals, companies can reduce the amount of waste in landfills. Green cleaning products are more sustainable as they use less packaging.

  • Use reusable office supplies

In the US alone, over 4 million pens are discarded per day, which is terrible for the environment. The solution to this problem will be to switch to reusable pens to limit their plastic waste. Reusable pens are refillable with new ink if they run out of fluid. Your organization can also cut down its production of paper waste by using tablets in place of sticky note pads. Additionally, encourage your staff to take notes electronically instead of using marker boards. Ask your team to keep track of your business materials to help you understand what products are being wasted and how to green your office space. 

  • Adopt green advertising strategies

Technology has made it easier to do virtually anything. With regards to eco-friendliness, technology allows eliminating the use of certain materials. For example, in advertising, you no longer need to print your message to get it across. You can use social media platforms to achieve that. Similarly, when conducting research or receiving feedback from clients to establish your marketing strategies, you can use platforms such as MaxDiff survey templates or Google forms. By launching eco-friendly marketing campaigns, companies can distinguish themselves as environmentally friendly business brands. These suggestions are practical as a large number of the world’s population uses smartphones.

  • Reduce vehicular emissions

It’s no longer news to say that the transportation sector is a heavy contributor to greenhouse gas production. In 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that emissions from road vehicles and commercial aircraft accounted for 29% of greenhouse gases in the environment. 2016 had previously seen even more shocking statistics — one American Community Survey found out that workers drove at least 115 million cars to work every day. Unfortunately, more oil-powered vehicles on the road mean more emissions. 

As a means of building a sustainable company, you can encourage your workers to use commuting options that reduce emissions. For example, you could start carpooling systems and subsidize transportation for your workers to use public transport instead of driving their own cars. The use of public transport saves travel time and minimizes fuel consumption in urban areas. You can also incentivize employees who walk or cycle to work every day.

  • Break the addiction to plastic convenience

Collectively, humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic per year. You can help reduce that number by limiting your plastic waste usage and searching for alternatives. Recycling can help your business minimize waste, save more money, and contribute to a healthy environment. Perhaps the smartest decision you can make is to decrease the number of single-use water bottles and coffee cups in your work environment. Annually, the average office worker uses roughly 156 plastic water bottles and discards about 500 coffee cups. When your organization starts using reusable materials, you can limit your carbon footprint and decrease the volume of waste in landfills. 

The future of the planet and that of humanity hinges on sustainability. Therefore, consider going green.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.

Eco-Friendly Garden Prep: Summer Tips for a Greener Business Space

By Julie Starr • June 5, 2025
If you're lucky enough to have a garden as part of your business, taking some time to set it up for summer is a great investment of your energy. Not only will it be ready for your customers to spend time in, but you can also incorporate some eco-friendly elements into it. Many people just think about the property and what eco-friendly updates they can make , but there are plenty that you can implement in your garden. This gives you the best of both worlds. You own a sacred and beautiful place for your customers to spend their summer, and at the same time, you can do your part for a better planet. If this is the route you want to take, then you also need to consider how to do this with the different seasons. To help you on your journey, here are some top tips for preparing your garden for summer. Plant trees and flowers Planting trees and flowers in your garden is a must. It will make a beautiful scene of nature for everyone to enjoy. Trees will provide people and animals with shade, as well as provide a habitat for wildlife. More trees are needed in the world because they purify the air that we breathe. Flowers, especially if you plant with pollinators in mind, can be an excellent way to attract bees and butterflies, which contribute largely to the earth. Use natural pest control When preparing your garden for summer, you can do this more sustainably and kindly by using natural pest control. Simply by planting trees and flowers, you are likely to attract lots of different wildlife, some of which may destroy your efforts. While all wildlife should be considered, you may need to take measures. Some better and more eco-friendly ways you can do this, as opposed to spraying toxic chemicals onto your plants and into the air, you can implement companion planting, using protective nets over your crops, choosing resilient plants, using natural repellents, and encouraging natural predators so nature can do its thing. Maintain your garden Maintaining your garden in itself can make it more eco-friendly. Composting your garden waste regularly, and kitchen waste can help you to reduce overall waste and create nutrient-rich soil. This is a great cycle of sustainability. You can also keep on top of things that need cleaning and replacing, so you can recycle the materials for other garden structures and projects, and repurpose things around your garden before they become waste. If you have features in your garden like a swimming pool, then a regular pool maintenance service is going to be vital in keeping your water consumption to a minimum, as when it is cleaned and maintained, it will need to be drained and refilled less as well as using less energy. You could also consider how you can use natural purification methods to reduce chemical usage and support biodiversity right in your backyard. Your garden is just an eco-friendly project waiting to be built. Use these top tips to help you get started.