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Five Fast Ways to Save Your Business Money During The Recession
Randy White & Cedric Justice, Lawns to Gardens
Financial choirs around the world are finally singing that the US is in a recession. If you operate a business, you didn’t need to wait to hear that, you already know it. It arrives every month in the form of rising bills and smaller profits. As your operational expenses keep rising, you find yourself wondering how many more payrolls you can tolerate in these financial conditions.
Here’s the good news: You can quickly trim some fat right now without cutting or gutting your employees. Here are five fast ways to save your business thousands of dollars a month during the recession:
1) SOURCE LOCALLY
Sourcing local products and services improves implicit costs, such as delays in business, transportation costs, and depending on the industry, freshness. The sustainability benefit is three-fold: economically it potentially saves your organization money; socially, it improves dollar velocity, improving the local economy. This improves the potential work pool your organization can draw from as well as the local infrastructure and ability for local customers to afford your product or service. Environmentally, it shortens supply chains, which uses less fossil fuels in transportation of goods.
TIP: Small businesses can barter with one another. Big Box stores do not have as much luxury in that department.
Randy White is a Peak Oil analyst with Green Mind Marketing, a firm focused on helping businesses maintain profits using post-petroleum marketing tactics. [email protected]
Cedric Justice is a business analyst and management consultant with Colourless Green Ideas, a firm focused on global business and sustainability (the yin/yang of our modern economy) [email protected]
(27 November 2007)
10 Solutions for Climate Change
David Biello, Scientific American
The enormity of global warming can be daunting and dispiriting. What can one person, or even one nation, do on their own to slow and reverse climate change?
But just as ecologist Stephen Pacala and physicist Robert Socolow, both at Princeton University, came up with 15 so-called “wedges” for nations to utilize toward this goal-each of which is challenging but feasible and, in some combination, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to safer levels-there are personal lifestyle changes that you can make too that, in some combination, can help reduce your carbon impact.
Not all are right for everybody. Some you may already be doing or absolutely abhor. But implementing just a few of them could make a difference.
Forego Fossil Fuels …
Infrastructure Upgrade …
Move Closer to Work …
Consume Less …
Be Efficient …
Eat Smart, Go Vegetarian? …
Stop Cutting Down Trees …
Unplug …
One Child …
Future Fuels …
Experiment Earth [geoengineering… a last resport] …
(26 November 2007)
Nice summary.
Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases
Matthew L. Wald, New York Times
The United States could shave as much as 28 percent off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations, according to a new report.
A large share of the reductions could come from steps that would more than pay for themselves in lower energy bills for industries and individual consumers, the report said, adding that people should take those steps out of good sense regardless of how worried they might be about climate change. But that is unlikely to happen under present circumstances, said the authors, who are energy experts at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.
The report said the country was brimming with “negative cost opportunities” – potential changes in the lighting, heating and cooling of buildings, for example, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels even as they save money. “These types of savings have been around for 20 years,” said Jack Stephenson, a director of the study. But he said they still face tremendous barriers.
Among them is that equipment is often paid for by a landlord or a builder and chosen for its low initial cost. The cost of electricity or other fuels to operate the equipment is borne by a tenant or home buyer. That means the landlord or builder has no incentive to spend more upfront for efficient equipment, even though doing so would save a lot of money in the long run.
Another problem, the report said, is that consumers often pay no attention to energy use in choosing gear.
(30 November 2007)
The original McKinsey report is available as a PDF.
