As a business owner or leader of a local organization, you can take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable practices across your operations while being a leader in the community.

Why Take Action?

Your business can take action to reduce the impacts of climate change and be more sustainable in a way that also helps your bottom line and attracts new customers. Many proactive steps to reducing emissions across operations—like retrofitting office spaces with high-efficiency and all-electric lighting, appliances, and equipment and transitioning fossil-fueled fleet vehicles to electric—are associated with long-term cost savings. Additionally, community members and tourists are increasingly investing their spending dollars in businesses, services, and products that align with their sustainability values.

Three Steps You Can Take Now

To promote sustainability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions across your operations, businesses and organizations can act by taking the following 3 steps.

1. Identify your organization’s emission sources and those that overlap with one or more of the seven emission sectors identified by the City using this checklist.
2. Explore the actions that the City is taking through Lead by Example to address the emissions sources you identified and consider implementing actions that are relevant to your operations, which can be found in Lead by Example: A Plan for Carbon Neutral City Operations.
3. Amplify the work you are doing and share your efforts with your members or customers, as well as peer businesses and organizations.

The City’s Approach: Accessible and Replicable

The City has developed an approach to achieving carbon neutral City operations that can be, in whole or part, applied to a variety of different industries and types of organizations. Within that approach, the City identified seven emissions sectors that broadly encompass City operations and named actions that focus on:

Whether you represent a retail store, restaurant, office, construction company, bank, medical center, school, nonprofit organization, or anything in between, it is likely that at least one of the above focus areas overlaps with your daily operations.

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To share ideas about how the City can better engage and share resources with community partners on Lead by Example, please contact Sustainability Manager, Chris Read, at cread@slocity.org.

If you are an organization interested in reducing your carbon footprint and would like to discuss our approach, please contact Sustainability Manager, Chris Read at cread@slocity.org.

For more information on what the City is doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions throughout the community, please read the Climate Action Plan for Community Recovery.