How To Become A More Sustainable Business

Julie Starr • June 22, 2021



As a business owner and company, part of your responsibility is to help make the world and environment a better place. You may have the desire to but are unsure of where to start or what to do to achieve this goal.

Be glad to know there are several ways and steps you can take that will help you become a more sustainable business that you can be proud of. Take it one small step at a time and track your progress so you can see how you’re doing as you go and what you may need to work on and focus on in the future.

Set Goals & Communicate the Initiative

One way to become a more sustainable business is to outline goals for what you want to accomplish in this area. Figure out a game plan and strategy for becoming greener and improving your current practices. For instance, it may be that you want to work with more sustainable businesses or use less energy at your office. Write down your goals and review them often so you can monitor how you’re doing along the way. Once you have a plan in place you should communicate your initiative and objectives to your company and employees so they can help you find success with the ideas you have in place.

Create A Green Team

You may struggle to become a more sustainable business if you’re the only one doing the work. Therefore, consider creating a green team of employees who are passionate about the cause and can help you reach your goals. Let them take charge and figure out how to get more people at your company involved. Give them some direction but then allow them to lead the way and come up with strategies to implement your plan and ensure your business follows through on this important initiative. Brainstorm ways to improve and then work together as a team to turn your ideas into reality.

Do Your Homework

One reason you may be struggling to be more sustainable is that you’re unsure of how to go about it. In this case, it’s best to do your homework and research so you can get some additional ideas and strategies. Study your competitors and find out what other businesses are doing in this area so you can follow suit or come up with other innovative and creative ways to do a better job with this project. Learn from their mistakes and successes and figure out how they’re running a more eco-friendly business and come up with your own model for success.

Bring Your Products & Marketing Online

Another way to become a more sustainable business is to change what you’re doing and how you’re operating. Consider bringing your products and marketing online so you’re using technology and less energy, actual waste, and physical items to run your business. Use your website to market your business instead of printing off flyers and signs. Make sure your website is a success and your message gets out by working with a company like Unravelseo.com that knows how to get you higher up in the search results.

Offer Remote Work

Think about offering remote work at your company to make it more sustainable. This way you don’t have to operate a physical office as much or as frequently and can save money not having to stock, light, and heat your building. You can save on energy and your employees can work at home instead of having to take their cars to work. Having fewer cars on the road is good for the environment and will save your employees time. You may also want to offer public transit commuter benefits for when they do have to come into the office, which is the greenest way to get around. It provides your workers with more flexibility and an opportunity to complete more tasks online and through technology. Make energy-efficient upgrades to your office for the days you do have to spend and work in it.

Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

You should also commit to reducing, reusing, and recycling as a business if you want to run a more sustainable operation. Make sure you have the right tools and set up to see the results you desire and do what’s in your power so you’re not always creating more waste. Make sure you have recycling bins around your office, print less and use technology more, and rethink your packaging and use of plastic. Once you get in the habit it’ll soon become second nature and you won’t have to think so hard to follow through with these practices. Make it a point to use stainable products in and around the office so you’re practicing what you’re preaching. It can be anything from the rolls of toilet paper you buy to the cleaning products that you use. You may also want to consider how you decorate your office and choose to shop and buy second-hand and consignment décor and furniture.

Reward Effort

You can do what’s in your power as a business owner to turn your company around for the better but you may struggle to succeed unless your employees stand behind you and support you. Become a more sustainable business by rewarding any and all effort that’s made by your team and those you work with. Make sure that they know you’re watching and monitoring their actions and hard work. Reward their behaviors as a way to offer positive reinforcement and get them to stick with it in the future.

Conclusion

These tips will help ensure you can become a more sustainable business over time and can thrive in this area. Be patient because it’ll take time to change habits and behaviors and get everyone on board with what you’re trying to achieve. Let these ideas provide you with a starting point for knowing where to begin and how to succeed in this area. Be proud of yourself for making an effort and getting your company on the right track to helping the environment and making the world a better place.

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.