{"id":2328,"date":"2015-01-08T17:06:40","date_gmt":"2015-01-08T23:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lazerdesigns.com\/?p=2328"},"modified":"2015-01-08T17:06:40","modified_gmt":"2015-01-08T23:06:40","slug":"real-world-ways-your-small-business-can-be-green-with-examples-from-lazerdesigns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/real-world-ways-your-small-business-can-be-green-with-examples-from-lazerdesigns\/","title":{"rendered":"Real World Ways Your Small Business Can Be Green, with Examples from LazerDesigns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At LazerDesigns, we believe in stewarding our resources for the good of our people, our community and our world. What can a small business do to make a difference and have a positive impact? How can your company be &#8220;green&#8221; and create sustainability?<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s a few real-world examples from LazerDesigns.<\/p>\n<h2>1. Redeem Boxes &#8211; Now THAT&#8217;S recycling, reusing what you can<\/h2>\n<p>At LazerDesigns, we see over 25,000 boxes come in and out our doors as we fulfill orders. That&#8217;s a lot of boxes! Through our Redeemed Boxes program, we re-tape, relabel, and reuse shipping boxes that are still structurally sound.<br \/>\nThis is real recycling &#8211; no energy spent to break it down, clean it, and recreate it.<br \/>\nThis also saves us and our customers thousands of dollars a year! This is savings we pass on through our competitive prices.<br \/>\nOf course, what we cannot reuse, we recycle.<\/p>\n<h2>2. Install LED Lighting<\/h2>\n<p>While LED lighting is still expensive (though prices are coming down), rebates from energy companies are encouraging businesses to bring down the energy consumption.<br \/>\nWhy are LED lights greener?<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Lower power consumption<\/li>\n<li>Create less heat, lowering your AC bill<\/li>\n<li>No toxic mercury (though they do contain nickle, lead, arsenic)<\/li>\n<li>More than 95% of LED lighting is recyclable<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Does installing LED lighting in your business makes sense? Here&#8217;s how it broke down for us:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We needed to retrofit our lighting from an old, outdated bulb type, so we had to upgrade to a newer, more energy efficient lighting type<\/li>\n<li>Retrofitting to newer T8 and T5 was expensive, but so is LED<\/li>\n<li>When comparing retrofitting with LED lighting, LED lighting was actually lower cost than T8 or T5<\/li>\n<li>Add in the lower energy cost of LED lighting+ energy rebate, and the winner is LED<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Plus, LED Lighting does look better!<br \/>\n<figure id=\"attachment_2329\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2329\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-2329\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/before-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Before LED lighting upgrade\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2329\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Part of our warehouse before LED lighting upgrade<\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\n<figure id=\"attachment_2330\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2330\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-2330\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/after-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"After LED Lighting upgrade\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2330\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">After LED Lighting upgrade<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<h2>3. Go as Paperless as possible<\/h2>\n<p>Whenever possible, we email documents. We&#8217;ve invested in an up-to-date paperless system for our customers. We don&#8217;t do much faxing (that&#8217;s so 90&#8217;s. Or 80&#8217;s). With digital signing, long agreements don&#8217;t need to be printed.<\/p>\n<h2>4. Reuse clean packing supplies<\/h2>\n<p>Packing paper, peanuts, air bubbles &#8212; it can all be reused multiple times. Instead of throwing it away, we reuse it.<br \/>\nOther idea: Use newspaper to pack boxes (we don&#8217;t do this, but some of our vendors do)<br \/>\nHow does your business reuse, recycle and redeem resources?<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At LazerDesigns, we believe in stewarding our resources for the good of our people, our community and our world. What can a small business do to make a difference and have a positive impact? How can your company be &#8220;green&#8221; and create sustainability? Here&#8217;s a few real-world examples from LazerDesigns. 1. Redeem Boxes &#8211; Now &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/real-world-ways-your-small-business-can-be-green-with-examples-from-lazerdesigns\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Real World Ways Your Small Business Can Be Green, with Examples from LazerDesigns&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"table_tags":[],"class_list":["post-2328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lazerdesigns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2328"},{"taxonomy":"table_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lazerdesigns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/table_tags?post=2328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}