As an entrepreneur, you are on your own, at least at the beginning, and don’t have big institutional backing or deep pockets to bail you out or pay for all of your great ideas. This extends to what you are able to do with respect to environmental initiatives and responsibility as well. There are, however, several things you can do as an entrepreneur to improve your environmental impact. Below are three such considerations and why they matter.
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Choose Your Credit Card More Carefully
If you are an entrepreneur, you likely have at least one credit card, and perhaps even two or more, linked to a combination of personal and business accounts. One way to incorporate philanthropy into your spending is to choose green or sustainable credit cards that have partnered with charities and other international organizations like the WWF. Every time you make a business purchase with your card, a percentage is earmarked for donation to the credit card company’s partner charity. You get to feel good about contributing something to a cause you believe in while growing and tending to your business.
Be More Selective About Your Bank
You can also improve your environmental impact as an entrepreneur by being more selective about where you do your banking, both retail and business. If you hold an account at a bank, the bank invests your capital in exchange for interest. How and where they invest that money matters, particularly with respect to things like pollution and environmental degradation. While doing due diligence on your bank, look to see what kinds of industries and companies the financial institution is investing in and what kind of deals it is underwriting. You can have an outsized environmental impact through your bank, so pay attention to how they use your and other clients’ money.
Take Advantage of Green Incentive Tax Write-Offs
Whether you run your business from your home or out of a commercial space that you rent or own, there are opportunities all around you to decrease your carbon footprint. If your home or office windows and lighting are old and inefficient, for example, you can swap them out for newer, more energy-efficient ones. Governments around the world, including the U.S., offer tax credits for things like switching to solar panels on your home, which make the cost of switching to solar cheaper. By making these kinds of improvements to the places where you conduct business, you help to directly reduce the carbon footprint of your entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
There are plenty of things that are within your control as an entrepreneur that can have a meaningful impact on the way you do business in the world. Only one of the above requires a capital expenditure on your part, while the first and second are largely effortless, although they may involve a degree of inconvenience in some cases. The private sector, of which entrepreneurs are an important part, has a major role to play in helping to combat climate change and environmental destruction. Above are just a few of the things you, as an entrepreneur, can do to throw in with the increasing number of business people, large and small, taking this role seriously.
About Carson Derrow
