Going green” not only provides great benefits to our planet, it also provides many advantages to business owners. Green businesses have healthier work environments, less unnecessary waste, and few pollutions and emissions, which can amount to legal and tax advantages as well as less expensive electricity bills. We at OI are proud of our Green Initiative and believe that it is the role of our business and others to lead the way for positive social change.
Our Green Initiative:
poweredbyOIAmerica is shifting to a “Green Culture” where all 300 million citizens are embracing the fact that environmental responsibility is everyone’s responsibility.
“To move the green initiative forward, you need to educate the consumer about the benefits of sustainable products,” said Matthew Standish, president and founder of Go Green LLC.
Here at OI, we take great pride in our green approach to the industry. Our Web platform for project management is specifically designed to incorporate cutting edge technology and the industry’s best practices to conserve both time and energy. Being poweredbyOI allows you to minimize the frequency of meetings, cut or eliminate the need for travel, and reduce paper output and redundancy by 50 to 75%.
“..If all corporations joined the drive to move to a “Paperless” society and stored all their information in electronic format as well as keeping all records in electronic format then hundreds of millions more sheets of paper would be conserved each year.
“… all of these practices allow us to reduce the carbon footprint and it involves our customers, giving them the chance to do great things for our planet,” Standish said.
“The benefits of sustainability go beyond what’s good for the environment. The benefits also include jobs and money for American companies and communities.”
We at OI are far from the only business incorporating more environmentally conscious business practices. Here is a list of the top 5 greenest companies in 2014 according to NEWSWEEK:
- Allergan: best known as the pharmaceutical company that created Botox and the Lap-Band. The company’s efforts in recent years have focused on waste management and energy-efficiency projects. For example, at its Irvine, California, headquarters, the company installed a solar panel–based electricity generating system. These efforts helped the company reduce its total energy consumption by 11 percent on a per square meter basis from 2011 to 2012. Allergan is one of a handful of pharma- companies that have joined the United Nations Global Compact, which sets important guidelines in the areas of human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption efforts.
- Adobe Systems:. This famous software company is a founding partner of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Building Health Initiative and is one of only a handful of Fortune 500 companies to have set the ambitious goal of achieving global carbon neutrality by 2015. Based on the latest available data, 70 percent of the square footage of the company’s global building footprint (including its San Jose, California, headquarters) is certified by LEED, the world’s pre-eminent set of green building standards. Adobe has also invested in renewable-energy technologies, including Wind-spire wind turbines and Bloom Energy fuel cells to help power several of its California facilities. Based on Newsweek’s “Water Productivity” metric, Adobe is the most water-productive software company on the planet, generating over $5 million in revenue for every cubic meter of water used.
- Ball Corporation: Headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, Ball Corp. is the largest producer of recyclable beverage cans in the world, manufacturing over 50 billion aluminum and steel cans each year. If you’re into canning and preserving (or just into shabby chic design), you’ve probably come across the classic Ball Mason jar. Ball participates in a variety of environmental initiatives, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings, Better Plants program and the Global Protocol on Packaging Sustainability 2.0, which helps develop a common set of metrics to enable informed discussions about packaging and the environment. The company also invested approximately $18.5 million in energy savings projects in 2012 and 2013, resulting in annual electricity savings of more than 51 million kilowatt hours and natural gas savings of approximately 110 million kilowatt hours. These savings are significant: It essentially offsets the energy use of about 6,100 U.S. households each year.
- Ecolab: At Ecolab, sustainability is embedded in the company’s products—its water, hygiene and energy technologies help other companies improve their resource efficiency and environmental performance. For instance, Ecolab’s DryExx conveyor management system, which replaces water with dry lubricants in bottling plants, is being used by PepsiCo to meet its new water-efficiency targets. Ecolab’s sustainability efforts are also channeled into its own operations. The company’s Create and Maintain Value (CMV) program, which identifies ways to make water, energy and wastewater management more efficient, is being systematically rolled out across its global facilities. For example, a CMV project unveiled in 2012 at the company’s Clearing, Illinois, facility helps the plant save about 1.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity, 33.5 million BTUs of natural gas and 59.3 million gallons of water annually. Ecolab was a founding partner of the Alliance for Water Stewardship’s International Water Stewardship Standard, a global framework to promote sustainable freshwater use, and is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, taking a leadership role on the organization’s CEO Water Mandate program.
- Sigma-Aldrich: Sigma-Aldrich is a life science and advanced-technology company that manufactures a huge array of products used primarily in scientific research, biotechnology and pharmaceutical development. Among the many other things, it is one of the top providers of organic and inorganic chemicals to labs all over the world. In recent years, the company has doubled down on its commitment to reduce water use; a recent project to improve steam use and boiler efficiency at the company’s headquarters in St. Louis led to savings of over 4,000 cubic meters of water in 2012.Sigma-Aldrich is taking steps to move sustainability into its supply chain. Its Air to Ocean project, initiated in 2012, helps identify opportunities to ship products and raw materials by ocean freight instead of air, which results in reduced fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Sigma-Aldrich increased its volume of ocean freight from 200 tons in 2011 to 350 tons in 2012, resulting in a reduction of carbon emissions by over 700 tons.
We at OI hope to join the high ranks of these companies by continuing to improve upon and expand our Green Initiative.
OI, Inc.
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Sources:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/businesses-should-green-766.html