Can Making Your Business More Virtual Make It More Sustainable?

Julie Starr • February 23, 2021



Many of us have been working virtually over the last year. Some businesses may choose to go back to normal eventually, while others might decide that a greater amount of remote working is suitable for them. You might be thinking about how making your business more virtual could benefit you, and one of the things that you can consider is how it might help you to make your business more sustainable. Remote working could be used to introduce green practices, from reducing the amount of office space that you use to less traveling required for your staff. So how could making your business more remote make it more sustainable?

Remove or Reduce the Need for Commuting

When you have a remote team, you can make your business more eco-friendly by removing the need for people to commute . Your staff won’t need to drive to work or use other methods of transport every day, before and after their workday. This cuts down on the amount of fuel that they need to use if they drive, not only reducing their carbon emissions but also saving them money. Even for people who prefer to hire a desk or join a coworking space, they can choose somewhere convenient for them that’s easy to get to.

You can help to cut down on travel in other circumstances too. People may not need to travel to attend job interviews, for example. Business travel might be less necessary if people can meet online instead of traveling to meet in person.

Reduce Your Office Space

If your business is more virtual, you don’t need as much space to accommodate your staff. You don’t have to get rid of offices and business premises completely, but you might be able to reduce the amount of space required. While you might still have a warehouse to deal with your order fulfillment, you might not need to have an office for your admin and support staff. Instead, they can work from home (or wherever they choose to work from). If you do ever need to provide space for them, such as for important meetings or team days, you can hire the space you need for the amount of time that you need it.

Less need for office space and other buildings means that you won’t be using energy and other resources for your business. If you work with other businesses that provide virtual services for you, you reduce the impact on the environment by sharing these services with other businesses. If you use a virtual answering service , you know that they are helping you and a number of other businesses instead of having to sustain your own team of people to answer phones. Of course, it’s also important to consider that your employees will instead be using these resources at home, which will cost them money and will be a more hidden way that your business makes use of essential resources.

Cut Down on Waste

Less business space also means that your business can produce less waste. If you don’t need an office, you don’t have to have office supplies . There’s no need to have paper, printer ink, paperclips, pens, or other resources that can be important in an office environment. Everything can be conducted online instead, using cloud applications and other tools to carry out necessary tasks. People who are working remotely also tend to spend more time at home, which means they might make choices such as making their own lunch instead of going out to buy something that produces a lot of waste.

If you digitize your business, there’s no need to do anything on paper. Not only does that save paper, as well as other resources such as printer ink and electricity, but it also means you don’t need space to store all of your paper documents and records. There’s no need for filing cabinets and rooms full of paper documents when you can just keep everything stored digitally instead. You can explore a range of options too, such as having your own servers or making use of cloud storage services, which can enable you to use shared servers.

Create a More Diverse, Sustainable Workforce

Making your business more virtual can also help you to hire a more diverse and sustainable workforce. When you’re able to hire from a diverse pool, you can find people who share the same values as your business, especially where sustainability and eco-friendliness are concerned. As well as creating businesses that are sustainabl e in an environmental way, this also helps to make your business more future-proof. You can offer equal opportunities to a wide range of people, regardless of their background or identity. You are able to offer more support to those who might need it through virtual working.

Use Sustainable Marketing Methods

Marketing is one of the key things that you can think about if you want to use remote working to ensure your business is sustainable. When you take your business completely online, you can remove the need for marketing methods that might be less useful. Sending out direct mail is potentially not particularly beneficial for an online business. Cutting back on marketing methods like this and focusing on online marketing not only helps you to save money but can make your business more sustainable. Use digital marketing methods to promote your business instead of print marketing or other techniques that aren’t so eco-friendly.

Make Your Supply Chain More Efficient

If you sell physical products, you might decide what making your business virtual means that you have more flexibility with how you fulfill orders. You could choose a more convenient place for your orders to be fulfilled, helping your business to cut down on carbon emissions. You can let another company take care of your fulfillment for you so that you’re able to manage everything remotely. This allows you to choose a location anywhere that helps to cut down on travel time between suppliers, fulfillment, and customers.

In fact, you can choose to work with various partners in your supply chain and beyond who are also sustainable. Running a virtual business gives you more flexibility to work with whoever you want to so that you can choose your partners more carefully.

Consider the Impact of Your Reach

Working remotely can allow you to work with people all over the world. It might also mean that you decide to expand your business into different countries. If you’re doing this, you should think about how your actions might have a more global reach on the environment too. Are there any ways in which you might be having an effect on different countries in various ways? Maybe you’re helping employees or business partners in other countries to be more eco-conscious and to make better choices for sustainability.

Provide Support for Employees

Just because you’re not working with your employees in person, it doesn’t mean you can’t provide them with support. Whereas before, you might have encouraged them to cycle to work or set up an office recycling scheme, there are still ways you can encourage them to be green when they work from home. You can still do things like creating an eco-committee , putting on video conference workshops about sustainability, or challenging employees to do certain sustainable actions. It’s also a good idea to form partnerships with other sustainable organizations to provide more support and set a good example.

Your virtual business could be more sustainable than ever. When you work remotely, you can reduce your business’s carbon emissions and encourage employees and business partners to be sustainable too.

Greener Clicks: How to Reduce Your Environmental Impact with Sustainable Digital Marketing

By Julie Starr • March 31, 2025
In the race to decarbonize our world, one area often overlooked is digital marketing. While it might seem inherently clean compared to print or physical campaigns, our online activities have a real and measurable environmental footprint. From servers powering your website to emails filling up inboxes, every click, stream, and scroll contributes to carbon emissions. At Taiga Company, we believe digital strategies can be powerful and low-impact. Here’s how to get started. Optimize for a Low-Carbon Web Why it matters: Websites and digital ads are hosted on servers that consume electricity, often powered by fossil fuels. Every time a user loads your site or ad, it uses energy. How to reduce your impact: Host green: Choose web hosts that use renewable energy or offset emissions. Clean up your code: Streamlined, efficient code reduces load times and energy use. Compress and reduce images: Smaller files mean faster pages and fewer emissions. Limit heavy media: Videos and animations are carbon-intensive; use them mindfully. A faster, leaner website isn’t just better for the planet—it also boosts SEO and user experience. Email Marketing with Intention Why it matters: Every email sent, received, and stored requires energy. Multiply that by millions of sends, and the impact adds up. How to reduce your impact: Clean your lists: Remove inactive subscribers to avoid waste. Segment wisely: Only send emails to those who will truly benefit. Use plain-text when possible: It’s lower in data and often more accessible. Reduce frequency: Send fewer, higher-quality emails with genuine value. Intentional emailing reduces not only emissions but also improves deliverability and engagement. Sustainable SEO and Content Strategy Why it matters: Search engines crawl, index, and serve up billions of web pages daily. Thoughtless content and bloated sites add to the load. How to reduce your impact: Create evergreen content: Focus on high-quality pages that stay relevant longer. Streamline your site structure: Fewer clicks to find content = less energy use. Use minimal plugins and scripts: Especially ones that load on every page. Green your CMS: Some content management systems are more resource-efficient than others. Sustainable SEO isn’t just eco-friendly—it’s good strategy. Fewer, better pieces often perform better than content mills. Rethink Marketing Automation Why it matters: Automated emails, ads, and data syncing can create a lot of digital clutter. That clutter eats up storage and energy. How to reduce your impact: Audit regularly: Retire old workflows and outdated automations. Optimize syncing: Reduce how often and how much data is transferred. Segment with purpose: Better targeting means fewer wasted sends. Use expiration dates: Don’t let outdated content or assets live forever. Efficient automation can reduce emissions and improve performance. Digital marketing isn’t going away—and it shouldn’t. It offers powerful tools for connection, education, and growth. But like all tools, it can be used more sustainably. At Taiga Company, we’re committed to helping organizations lower their environmental impact without sacrificing reach or results. Sustainable digital marketing is not only possible; it’s essential. Ready to make your marketing aligned with your company's corporate sustainability plan? Let’s start the conversation.

World Water Day 2025: How Beverage Brands Are Leading on Water—and Why Communicating It Matters

By Julie Starr • March 24, 2025
At Taiga Company, we work alongside brands who are not only doing the hard work of sustainability—but are learning how to talk about it in ways that connect with their stakeholders. This World Water Day , we’re reflecting on how leading beverage companies are advancing bold water stewardship goals and communicating those efforts clearly, thoughtfully, and strategically across digital platforms. Water is foundational to the beverage industry. From ingredient sourcing to packaging to community health, it’s a resource that demands attention—not just in terms of conservation, but in terms of how that commitment is shared with consumers, investors, regulators, and partners. Below, we’re highlighting three beverage companies whose recent water stewardship actions—and storytelling—stood out. PepsiCo: From Field to Community, Global Water Replenishment in Action PepsiCo launched 16 new water replenishment projects across nine countries in 2024 alone, restoring more than 1.7 billion liters of water to local ecosystems. These projects are practical and people-centered—ranging from irrigation efficiency in Texas to sustainable farming practices in the Dominican Republic. What stood out: clear project data, human-focused storytelling, and alignment with global frameworks. PepsiCo’s water webpage provides easy access to targets, progress updates, and case studies, helping stakeholders understand both the “why” and the “how.” Suntory Global Spirits: Water at the Heart of the Brand Suntory’s brands—from Maker’s Mark in Kentucky to Yamazaki in Japan—share a common origin: water. The company’s commitment to being net water positive by 2050 isn’t just a corporate goal—it’s integrated into brand storytelling, on-site conservation efforts, and supplier engagement. Their message is rooted in authenticity: water isn’t just an operational input, it’s an essential ingredient in their identity. Learn more on Suntory’s efforts via their LinkedIn post . Asahi Group Holdings: Building Local Water Resilience Together In the Netherlands, Asahi’s Koninklijke Grolsch partnered with stakeholders in the Twente region to develop a local water platform focused on reducing consumption and innovating wastewater reuse. This goes beyond operational efficiency—it’s about building water resilience within a shared ecosystem. Their community-first framing and long-term investment approach were key themes in this post . Why This Matters At Taiga Company, we believe that sustainability actions only go as far as their ability to be understood, felt, and trusted. Communicating water stewardship isn’t just about reporting metrics or sharing photos of wetlands (although both can help). It’s about giving stakeholders the context they need to see a company’s values in motion—clear commitments, thoughtful execution, and measurable impact.  If your team is evolving its water strategy—or simply looking for better ways to communicate what you're already doing—we’d love to be part of that conversation.
Share by: