The Future’s Green For Technology Based Businesses
No matter whether you agree with the majority of the scientific community that global warming is genuine and could have damaging effects on the life systems on Earth or not, since Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth“, environmental awareness has grown massively and almost everybody now has a social conscience.
But with our 21st century unquenchable thirst for electronic gadgets, is the eco-friendly meme changing the way we think about tech? Can tech enthusiasts still be eco-friendly when iPhones and iPads have batteries that need charging every 12 hours?
One Internet entrepreneur, Adam Patel, is telling us that it is. He has a section on his blog called “Saving The World” in which he discusses amongst other philanthropic and charitable projects, at length, how he’s being greener in his home and in his business.
Adam runs a company called Mogul Direct, which he founded in 2009. It absorbed and now owns the first business he ever started, Magic MegaStore, a leading online retailer of magic tricks in the UK as well as several other e-commerce stores. Being an Internet entrepreneur, Adam is running gadgets 24/7. His laptop is switched on from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to bed. He admits that it is usually the first act of the day to switch on the laptop, even before getting out of bed or even sitting up.
His iPhone is constantly on. His business relies on web servers which are always on.
After all this, you’d expect him to have an enormous carbon footprint. But he doesn’t. In fact, it’s almost zero.
How?
Using what have been called “green gadgets“: A solar powered laptop charger and a solar powered iPhone charger take the sting out of a lot of his most power hungry devices, while green web hosting, now becoming more common, means his web servers are powered entirely by natural and renewable energy sources.
Mogul Direct is largely a mail order company. And being a mail order company, it uses a lot of paper based packaging like padded envelopes and jiffy bags. To save trees, Mogul Direct strictly uses only recycled packaging and encourages its customers to recycle it again once they’ve opened it. This is another tactic that both saves money and helps the environment.
Office work, even in the 21st century, still uses a lot of paper. By combining the paperless office with cloud computing, Adam was able to cut his paper usage almost entirely. The only paper copies of anything he still keeps are letters from the tax office.
These ideas and others all focus upon trying to reduce the need for resources by making attempts at reducing the quantities used. Of course, this has positive economic consequences too. You might want to try some of these ideas in your business so that you too can make money and save the planet.
