Study Concludes Businesses Need to Focus More on Environmental Responsibility

Nowadays, the majority of us are making a serious conscious effort to be as eco-friendly as possible in our day to day lives. We incorporate all sorts of environmentally friendly changes into our personal regimes and our home lives in a bid to reduce the negative impact that human behaviour is having on the world that we inhabit. This is brilliant. After all, if we all alter our behaviour slightly for the better, we will begin to observe a reduction in environmental changes that are detrimental to ourselves, wildlife, and the rest of the Earth itself. However, have you ever considered that we should take things a step further? We should be implementing changes in our professional lives too! When you’re a small business owner, you’re in a position of authority and power, and you should use this to be able to make further positive changes in aid of our planet. There are so many things that you can do to make your working environment a greener space. One study has shown that the key to adopting sustainable professional practices largely lies in contracting. Let’s take a look at its findings and how to implement them!

EcoVadis and Affectio Mundi Study

This year, the French environmental and social governance agency Affectio Mundi partnered up with Ecovadis - global leaders in the business sustainability ratings for global supply changes - to carry out a study into sustainability clauses in commercial contracts and their overall effect on the environment. Officially named “Sustainability Clauses in Commercial Contracts: The Key to Corporate Social Responsibility” showed that many businesses and their clients are unlikely to take environmental responsibility seriously unless it is officially contracted. Official contracts make terms and conditions legally binding, so if there are terms and conditions that pertain to environmental responsibility, professionals won’t have any choice other than to stick to them!

Dealing With Contracts

So, if you’re a small business owner and fancy incorporating these terms and conditions into your contracts, you first need to know how to manage your contracts responsibly. While it would be impossible to provide a step by step guide in just one article, you should conduct a little research and focus on Life Cycle Management, the scope of environmental responsibility in the contract, and liabilities involved should the terms be breached.

Further CSR

All of this can be considered a CSR clause in your contracts. CSR stands for corporate social responsibility. They allow you to go beyond the legal requirements of ethical practice in your business and there are various other areas that you can focus on beyond eco-sustainability. So, if you want to run as ethical a business as possible, you should look into further CSR possibilities and enforce areas that are significant to you.

Thanks to this study, we can now see that we do need to take the environment seriously within business and that we should start implementing CSR clauses into our contracts in order to help the world that we are thriving within!