The recent increase in awareness about global warming has prompted several sectors of society to take action in helping to prevent its escalation. One of these is the business sector, whose major players have now begun to fully realize that recklessly rushing headlong with their operations with little thought for the environment will have serious repercussions — having a whittled down supply of resources that are essential to their operations in the future will potentially incapacitate, if not devastate, their businesses altogether. Many factions of the sector have now begun ensuring the sustainability of their respective businesses and have imposed upon themselves the requisite that in no way will their operations endanger the planet, its inhabitants, and its resources.

As such, corporations all around the world have started conducting initiatives to help the environment in various ways. Most companies start internally: as part of their financial and environmental strategies, a lot of companies are starting to adopt paperless systems to lessen the demand for wood necessary for the fabrication of paper. Moreover, the savings that large corporations and businesses get because of not having to purchase vast quantities of paper can be quite substantial. Savings in processing time and data management costs are also one of the major benefits that corporations get when they adopt a paperless system especially now that most data is transmitted through electronic networks.

Companies around the world have also considered the environmental impact of the products and services that they offer to their markets. Because manufacturing firms use a lot of energy, they create reasonably larger carbon footprints than most other types of businesses. To address this, manufacturing companies all over the world have started to re-evaluate the way they run their shops. For instance, manufacturing companies are now more conscious about the wastage, recyclability, energy usage, and production efficiency since all of these things create a negative impact on the environment if not managed properly. As such, manufacturing firms start to look at the environmental impact not only during the production stage but as early as the research and design phases to ensure that the materials, the production methods and the final product will have very little contribution to the company’s carbon footprint.

Service oriented companies have also started to look at ways on reducing their carbon footprint. By offering carbon offsets programs to customers and opting to buy power from renewable energy suppliers, service companies are able to minimize their contribution to the climate issue.

Here are some companies and the initiatives that they have started to address the problem of global warming:

Burt’s Bees

Burt’s Bees reputation as an “Earth friendly, Natural Personal Care Company” has definitely been true in the company’s efforts to help preserve the environment. Burt’s Bees understands the fact that in order for their business to continue well into the future, they must ensure that their major source of raw material remains prolific.

As early as 1989, Burt’s Bees already executed plans to help preserve the environment. What initially started as a small project among its employees has now changed into a formalized company program called ECOBEES (Environmentally Conscious Organization Bringing Environmentally Empowered Solutions) that implements efforts that advocate environment-friendly business practices within the company as well as its business affiliates.  All Burt’s Bees employees effectively work as part of a single ECOBEES team. Burt’s Bees makes this program a compelling program to get with: employees are measured in terms of how much participation they put into it. Their compensation evaluation is partly dependent on it, as sustainability is now a standard metric in the evaluation of employee performance in the company.

Another one of Burt’s Bees plans is to implement their goal of using energy only from renewable sources by 2020. By that time, they will also have applied a zero waste system in their group, as well as having a LEED Platinum/ISO 14001 certified green building.

The company also has a recycling program set up with assistance from Sonoco, a recycling group that collects all of Burt’s Bees manufacturing waste and recycles them. This effort on their part is proof that Burt’s Bees is on the lookout for manufacturing methods and processes that can alter their production line to a zero waste system so that recycling wouldn’t even be necessary.