May 2, 2008 | Filed under: Going Clean, Solutions by Nick | No Comments »

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.

April 23, 2008 | Filed under: Going Clean by Nick | No Comments »

Our Earth Day launch of the Cleaner Commerce campaign was a big success and we enjoyed the feedback people sent in! We still have a bunch of things in the works like enhancing the impact calculator and adding features to the blog. The Cleaner Commerce you see today is just the beginning of what will become a much larger campaign with all sorts of informative content and useful tools to help companies become more efficient.

Earth Day 2008 has come and gone, but the value of running a business efficiently remains. Earth Day is a great day to make an extra effort to “go green,” but the benefits of using resources responsibly do not stop there.

On the business side of the equation, running your operations more efficiently saves money and gives employees more time to focus on value-adding projects. It can be a challenge to overcome inertia and actually get efficient solutions implemented, but it is well worth it once you do.

The environmental benefits of efficiency are very clear – you do more with fewer resources and produce less pollution. Enough said!

It is also no secret that taking steps to be more efficient is great for corporate image – people like the good guys better!

Join us over the next several weeks as we discuss how companies can take steps to become more efficient, and ultimately become better businesses.