May 2, 2008 | Filed under: Going Clean, Solutions by Nick

Ok, here’s the deal: businesses are far more concerned with the bottom line than they are about “going green.” Quite frankly, they should be. If a company loses heaps of money trying to be green, and goes out of business as a result, it can’t exactly be green anymore, can it? For a company, doing good things for the environment only makes long-term sense if it is also good for business.

Every day we are bombarded with stories and advertisements from companies like GE, and Wal-Mart proclaiming their new-found love for the environment. In reality, these companies recognized that going green boosts the bottom line. They see that customers care about their practices, efficiency initiatives save money, and they can reduce their risk of getting sued for violating environmental regulations.

The real challenge for a company considering green initiatives is to decide what exactly to do. We think the best choice is to identify and replace business processes that are both financially and environmentally wasteful.

We’ll be honest – when Cleaner Commerce’s sponsor, ADX, was started in 1992, the goal was simply to provide a better way for companies to do business. It was only later that ADX realized it also helps thousands of companies waste less paper.

Another company, GreenPrint, has developed software that prevents extra sheets of paper from being wasted when documents are printed. They promote the tree saving benefits, but the real selling point of their product is the estimated $90 per user savings in paper and ink each year. The environmental benefits are really just an added bonus to a solution that is good for business.

Cleaner Commerce likes these sorts of solutions – ones that primarily serve a business purpose, but also happen to do good things for the environment. We believe that the only realistic way businesses can reduce their environmental impacts is if there are cost-effective steps they can take to do so. Our goal is to help your business get connected with better ways to do business that also incidentally do good things for the planet.