What Is Going Green?

 

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When considering the costs and benefits of going green, perhaps the best place to start is with an understanding of what is meant generally by "going green." Environmentally friendly activities have been popular for many decades, to conserve energy, reduce pollution and save money.

The impetus for the recent green movement came from the theory that human-generated release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was contributing to a warming of the planet. These concerns caused some governments, businesses, and individuals to reexamine their own roles in the release of carbon dioxide and to attempt to reduce their output.

When we speak today of going green, we generally refer to something broader than global warming. We usually are referring to a heightened awareness of using the Earth's resources more efficiently. The term today includes efforts to conserve our natural resources, reduce our contributions to landfills, and reduce pollution generally. Going green, then, can be summarized by the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle"--which means reduce waste, reuse what you can, and recycle what you can't.

Small businesses have been slow to embrace the green movement, for one very good reason: in the beginning, adopting green technologies was an expensive prospect, with very little benefit other than the satisfaction of feeling that you were doing your part to help. That psychic satisfaction has value, of course, but rarely did it outweigh the significant costs typically associated with going green.

In late 2008, for example, The New York Times ran a story about a guy who installed two small wind turbines on his roof to supply some of his power needs. The turbines costs $10,000 each, and the owner admitted that he wouldn't recoup his costs for many years, if ever, but that he didn't care. Few small business owners are willing to spend significant sums of money without any prospect of recovering the costs.

In addition, you could argue that using the term "going green" to describe these initiatives has served as an impediment to their adoption because of the political antagonisms that have existed between environmentalists and the business community. It is, in a sense, a public relations problem. Perhaps the business community would have been more likely to adopt green technologies had the movement been known as "becoming more energy-efficient" rather than "going green."

In any event, the times, as they say, are a-changing. As environmental concerns have increased and as the costs of green technologies have come down, more and more businesses owners--both large and small--have begun adopting green technologies. All the signs point to those numbers continuing to go up in the coming years.

To learn more about whether green, or energy-efficient, technologies make sense for your small business, take a look at any of the following:

• What are my green choices?
• How do I determine cost effectiveness?
• What resources are available?
• How can I get started?