How businesses can affect the environment

One thing that everyone is concerned about these days is how changes in the environment and how governments are responding affect your business. Whether governments are really serious about going green and saving the planet or are just after more taxes will bear out as time progresses. Below we have some of the areas that may affect your business from environmental factors.

The environment and tax

The biggest changes so far are so called green taxes. Certainly in the UK there are higher taxes on the biggest cars that polute the most and even the London congestion charging zone now has an emmissions zone where the largest poluting vehicles pay an additional tax to enter the zone.

This has certainly changed peoples attitudes towards which cars they drive but it also affects businesses with vans and lorries and taxes increase. The UK actually has the highest fuel taxes in the world that includes air passenger duty

Other areas that have taxes include land fill taxes to discourage land fill of non compostable waste.

There are a few tax breaks that businesses may qualify including land remediation relief for businesses that clean up contaminated land if there is a substance in, on or under the land that has the potential to do harm to humans, ecosystems or water sources.

This relief is 150% of the cost of the clean up exercise although there are conditions you should check for.

Other environmental factors

There are so many ways in which businesses can cut down on waste and usage of limited supplies of natural resources. Every department in an organisation can help including back office functions such as accounting.

Examples include using recycled paper rather than bleached paper, printing on 2 sides, using electronic mail instead of printing, turning off lights and computers at night, using LPG as a fuel, providing incentives to staff to use public transport or cycle to work etc

If every business cut waste by 10% the effect on environmental changes would be quite dramatic. It's a mindset change and soon we'll all be reducing our own carbon footprint and environmental impact of the way we live our lives and operate our businesses.

So what next?

Generate an environmental policy

To show your staff and customers (and even yourself) you are serious about the environmental impact your business is making how about creating and publishing an environmental policy ?. An excellent site with a lot of information is this environmental policy development site with free sample policies and help and guidance to help you create a policy that means something.

So long as you can show commitment and have set goals, how you are going to achieve them and update people on your progress then your policy will have credence.

Integrate the environment into your business

The best stance is to integrate environmental thinking into all your business decisions as though it was like a financial decision. Every decision you make has a financial impact that's important and so does the environment. Think how you can reduce waste or not develop something that's going to negatively impact the environment.

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