Saving the Planet, One Home Business at a Time

Welcome to Blog Action Day, people. I’m sure there are many bloggers who have written amazing things already and have great tips, ideas and essays about saving the earth. Sadly, I haven’t read any of them yet because my computer has a virus and I’m writing this from my Blackberry while quietly sobbing in the corner. (That’s not even true. I don’t have a Blackberry, but it makes a good story. I’m actually typing this in a Word document before racing to the nearest internet café. If you want to find out how to deal with technical issues minus the sobbing and excessive drinking, click here.)

I’m not going to get into why we need to save the planet from imminent destruction because there are other more educated and articulate people doing that already. (The whole Al Gore Nobel Prize thing comes to mind.) What I am going to do is give you one tip that will help you and your home business make the biggest difference you possibly can. It’s hard to commit to community clean-up days and waving a placard at demonstrations and living in a solar powered home. It’s hard to make tiny changes when the problem seems so vast. It’s hard to get emotionally involved when all we see is damage and destruction and death. There is one thing you can do, though, that will revolutionize your ecological footprint.

You have to think.

You cannot allow yourself to be anaesthetized to the importance of the Earth. You cannot stick your head in the sand. You cannot slip and say, “It’s just one piece of paper.” You have to think.

1. Think before you print.

I got a lovely email from Eric Windsor from Young Go Getter and in his totally awesome signature line, it reads “Before printing, please remember our environment!” How much crap do we print because we’re too lazy to bookmark the page or read it right now or just make a note to go back and read it? We could all probably reduce the amount we print by 90% with no noticeable impact on our business functions.

2. Think about your electricity.

When I used to work outside the home, I went around my house before I left in the morning and turned everything off. I don’t do that anymore because my mental reminder, the physical act of leaving the house, is gone. Sometimes I’ll realize there are not one but two lights on in my bedroom, the heater’s on in the baby’s room even though he’s at the park with the nanny, the bathroom light is on and so is the one in the kitchen. All this while I’m in my office. The same is true for my cell phone charger - I leave it plugged in 24 hours a day and actually charge my cell phone once a week. This is draining energy completely unnecessarily. I need to start thinking about what’s running and if it really needs to be.

3. Think before you throw anything out.

This is a big one. Before any item leaves your home, think about where it’s going. Think about where it’s going right now, and where it will eventually end up. This is true for stuff that we normally consider to be outright garbage, but also paper, cell phones, computers, busted filing cabinets, the whole nine yards.

There are currently three laptop computers in this house, two of which are completely useless to me. They’re old and clunky and totally redundant in my life. They could help someone else, though, and not end up in a landfill somewhere. I could give them to a charity. I could send them off for refurbishing. I could offer them up on my local Freecycle website. (If you’re not already using Freecycle you will be completely gobsmacked by the junk people will take. My old broken TV? Gone in 12 minutes. Jury-rigged futon frame my husband built in college, sans actual futon mattress? Picked up the next day.)

It feels like you can’t make a difference. It feels like switching your light bulbs to CFLs won’t really help that much. It feels like that pizza flyer that you don’t bother to recycle because the recycling bin is still outside and it’s raining and you just don’t feel like bringing it in yet won’t change anything. If you think about it, you’ll realize that it does make a difference.

There are an estimated 20 million home office workers in the United States alone, which I feel is a pretty conservative estimate. Maybe your CFL, your pizza flyer, your old cell phone doesn’t make that much of a difference. But 20 million? That’s how we can change the world.

You’re just in time! Click here to read Day One of our How To Work From Home Without Losing Your Mind tutorial.

***

Want a small business marketing coach of your very own? Click here to get started.

By Naomi Dunford - Oct 15, 2007 in Home Based Business - 6 Comments