Strategize:
What does "green" really mean?
Defining Green Business
ICF believes green business starts at the focal point of any organization’s basic business operations: through its people, its products, or even its processes. Across the entire enterprise there are numerous opportunities to green various aspects of any company.
Green Procurement
For some companies, the greatest environmental impact comes from developing green products and services. Greening the entire product life cycle, from development to packaging to reusability and/or recyclability of the end product after its useful life, are critical components to ensuring an environmentally friendly strategy for any company's products and services.
Green the Core Business Operations
Other companies begin the environmental journey by first focusing on developing green internal operations. This entails looking at the energy used to run the business and the corresponding emissions resulting from basic business operations.
Green Products and Services
Many companies today are looking to green their supply chain by better managing their vendors and suppliers on the environmental impact of their products and services. Lowering the environmental impact of source materials can significantly reduce the overall environmental impact of a product or service.
Beginning The Green Journey
Many companies are immediately ready to start on green business initiatives—they may know they want to execute a specific program or, given the recent urgency over climate change, they may want to begin with a carbon footprint. Others, however, are not sure of their desired level of commitment or of the potential impact or benefit for their business.
For these clients, ICF offers a high-level green business strategy solution. Within a few weeks, an ICF team of experts will:
- Analyze your business
- Review the quality of existing data
- Evaluate the interest level among your staff and internal stakeholders for becoming more environmentally friendly
- Determine the potential areas of focus that are likely to yield the biggest impact and payback for your organization
- Analyze what your competitors are doing
To inform the decision-making process, ICF then delivers a presentation outlining the timelines, cost ranges, resource requirements, and proposed implementation roadmap for assessing, designing, implementing, measuring, and optimizing green initiatives.
For those organizations that do not know how serious they are about going green or are unsure of the potential benefits, this is a great, low-cost, first step to test the waters and ensure that a meaningful and relevant green strategy is in place before any investment dollars are committed.