In honor of Earth Day, let’s take a few minutes to think about the environmental impact of our businesses. Who am I focusing on here? Entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, startups, consultants and other small businesses. These types of businesses usually don’t have the capacity (time, money, or other resources) to focus on their environmental impacts. Over the last three years I have coached many small businesses to create action plans of how they can make their businesses more sustainable – both socially and environmentally. Here is my short list of advice for the small business owner who hasn’t yet tried to understand the negative environmental impacts of their business. Hopefully it will inspire you to make at least some small changes where it counts.

For Solopreneurs and consultants, you have the most control over the items you purchase and your travel. If your physical work environment is a coworking space or leased space in which the landlord fully controls many of the resources, you will make the biggest impact in the office by communicating your values about sustainability to your community. Start a conversation with other tenants or those who share your space. It is likely that creative ideas that often will save money will emerge. Your landlord, or those who manage workspaces, will likely be interested in what you have to say – especially if it will save money – they want satisfied, engaged, long-lasting customers.

Some of us know exactly which areas of our business to focus on making “less bad”. For the rest of us, it might not be so obvious. You may know roughly how many dollars you spend on electricity, gas for vehicles, trash hauling, travel, shipping, paper and office supplies, but many small businesses are not managing their USAGE of these different resources. If you are serious about managing these resources, you need to dig deeper into the bills and understand how you are being charged and look at least of year’s worth of history. If you have a home-based business, understanding your baselines is still important, with your business just being a subset of the entire household. If you know your starting point, you can set reasonable goals, measure any progress you make, and have a good story to tell.

Where should you focus your efforts? Is your electric bill or your fuel use your greatest source of impact? Or do you do use a lot of office paper or direct mail? Your baseline usage or waste generation can all be converted to an equivalent amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Completing a detailed greenhouse gas inventory of your business to calculate its carbon footprint can be time consuming and require technical knowledge. To more quickly get a feel for the relative magnitude of your business’ carbon impacts, try using an online carbon footprint calculator.

There are many to choose from for individual households but few focused on small businesses. If you are a solopreneur with a home-based business, the individual calculators will probably be adequate for doing a rough estimate of your business’ carbon footprint. If you want to dig a little deeper, and especially if you have control over a workspace separate from your home, I like the Cool Climate Calculator. It was created by the Cool Climate Network which is a university-government-business-ngo partnership at the University of California, Berkeley. The calculator has a great five minute tutorial video, allows for both simple or advanced inputs, and covers a small business’ facilities, travel, and purchasing. It also has a Take Action section with a long list of actions a business can take to reduce their carbon footprint. You can enter goals in this section and it calculates estimated savings (dollars and carbon emissions) for your business.

Another online tool I found helpful is from Carbonfund.org. Carbon Fund is a non-profit that sells carbon offsets. The website has calculators that allow you to estimate the carbon emissions of various activities or resources you use and the cost to offset those carbon emissions. When you buy carbon offsets, you are supporting energy efficiency, renewable energy, and reforestation projects that combat climate change and might not happen without the funding provided from carbon offsets. Even if you are not prepared to purchase carbon offsets, the website’s calculators are a quick way to learn about how much carbon emissions your business activities are creating. The website has calculators for office space, fleet, business travel, employee commute, events, paper use and shipping. Both websites are a good place to start.

If I have peaked your interest, you need more ideas, or more questions have bubbled up, I would love to start a conversation. Happy Earth Day!

After a 15 year career in corporate accounting and finance, Ellen completed an MBA in Sustainability and switched her focus to helping organizations advance their sustainability programs: establishing baseline benchmarks, setting goals, evaluating project paybacks, engaging stakeholders, and evaluating and reporting results. After three years of coaching small to medium-sized businesses as part of the REV Sustainability Circles® program, Ellen is now in transition looking for her next great opportunity to help organizations move along the Sustainability path. Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/ellenkappes