Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Greening Your Business

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Greening Your Business starts from the beginning and works its way through every aspect of what it means to 'green your business' and how to accomplish it. It goes far beyond recycling office paper to examining the carbon footprint of all business activities and giving direction on how to reduce the impact.

Because it focuses on business, the authors watch every penny, encouraging business owners and operators to go green for the bottom line. Personally, I've always wondered why businesses resist going green, when it is dollar-smart. One of my favorite examples in the book is one of the authors' friends, who "took the initiative to be the green champion in her office building...Upper management...she felt did not support her or the greening program she was trying to initiate." Read: thought she was a pain in the butt. They were converted when she discovered that her company had been watering the neighbor's lawn for the past five years, to the tune of $17,000.

Riley and Gaddonniex take every assumption apart: manufacturing, packaging, transportation, company events, and then help the business market what they've accomplished. I especially appreciated the Restaurant and Food chapter, which looks closely at the environmental as well as financial costs of food production.

The Glossary and Resources sections are excellent references. Worth having on the shelf for these alone!

What does it truly mean to "green" your business? To a lot of managers, it just means buying recycled paper or having re-usable coffee cups. But in this carbon footprinting age, it's much more than that. You have to take into account the environmental impact of getting your employees to and from work and energy use while they are there. This highly readable and often light-hearted book tells you nearly everything you need to know about making your business greener and cleaner. It's an essential primer to what is becoming a subject we can't avoid any longer. -- John F. Wasik, author "The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome" and "The Audacity of Help"