How Can You Make Your Team Greener?

Julie Starr • April 6, 2021



Making your business more environmentally conscious starts with your team. Employees are a company’s most precious asset. But they also represent the best partner in tackling environmental impacts and creating a green workplace. A lot of companies have considered permanently moving to a virtual office setup as a result of the pandemic. Unfortunately, it is fair to say that not every business sector can viably work in a remote setting. Consequently, when a digital workforce isn’t the way forward, you need to focus your green efforts on helping your team on-site become your most significant environmental asset. Here are some of the most commonly overlooked tips and tricks to encourage your team to adopt eco-friendly behaviors. 

Recruit talent that will stay

Not many businesses consider the environmental impact of the recruitment process. Recruiting is an involved process that contributes to high paper and ink use (through printing resumes), increased consumption of energy during the preparation and interview phase, increased travel and carbon emission on the road for recruiters and applicants, high fashion consumption as applicants purchase last-minute outfits to make a good impression. Unfortunately, if your company has a high turnover rate, the environmental impacts of recruitment are constantly repeated. Ideally, a business wants to recruit talent that is going to remain with the company for a long time. This could range from specialist skills such as recruiting experts via h1b sponsorship and niche targeting to introducing apprenticeship and mentoring programs that help staff progress within the company. 

If you are looking for specific types of individuals for your business, then it is worth exploring services such as an investigator. A private investigator can reveal key information about potential employees including how long they tend to stay in a position, whether they feel loyalty to companies they work for, and the type of incentives that are likely to ensure they are content in a business.

Go paperless

Most businesses are familiar with the go paperless claim to reduce their environmental waste. However, many employers are keen to turn a blind eye to paper consumption in the office. There are many reasons for preferring a paper-based work environment. People find it easier to digest printed information or to write down notes with a pen rather than a keyboard. However, what you may not realize is that a single tree results in approximately 110 lbs of CO2 that’s released into the atmosphere. Additionally, every tree that isn’t cut down can absorb CO2 gasses. In other words, every sheet of paper you use in the office has a double negative impact on the environment. It’s time to measure exactly how many trees your office is using in a month with this online calculator . Understanding the real impact of paper can transform your and your employees’ mindset about digital tools.  

Change your restroom supplies

An employee spends approximately 14 minutes in the toilet every day. During this time, they will use toilet paper, wash their hands and dry them. Switching to recycled toilet rolls, soap bars, and paperless hand dryers can make a huge difference to the sustainability of your restrooms. 

Bring green into your office kitchen

The office kitchen generates a lot of trash and garbage throughout the year, from pre-bought lunches to tea bags and organic wastes. It’s a good idea to maximize your bin policy and ensure that the kitchen can cut down unnecessary waste and pressures on the environment. Ideally, with the presence of lunches, fresh fruits and vegetables, and biodegradable coffee pods and tea bags, you want to add a compact bin . This can be repurposed to keep your office garden nourished, for example. 

A green team is the result of commitment, investment, and strategic thinking from the business. You can’t expect your employees to develop sustainable behaviors if you don’t give them the tools to do so. 

 

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.