Being Eco-Friendly as a Funeral Industry Supplier

We recently exhibited at the ICCFA conference in San Antonio and had a wonderful time meeting our current customers and introducing our answering service to other funeral directors.  As I was looking around the convention I kept seeing the words eco-friendly and green with many exhibitors.  I began to speak to companies within the funeral industry about what those words mean to their product or service.  I found that there is a movement within the industry to go green.  Some of the products I learned about included; eco-friendly caskets made from 97% recycled materials, eco-friendly urns that are water biodegradable and even natural/green embalming chemicals.  This made me examine how an answering service can be eco-friendly as a supplier to the funeral industry.

There is many simple strategies a funeral industry supplier can do to be more eco-friendly.  Most eco-friendly strategies take little effort that any office can adopt.  Some of the changes we have adopted to make us more eco-friendly includes;

11) Become more digital oriented.  We have focused on becoming a paperless environment.  Contracts are emailed over to our potential customers.  We do not need to print out a contract or price list to get it to our potential customers.  We can email over the digital copies.  Sure you can purchase greener, recycled paper which I encourage everybody to do, however there is nothing greener than no paper at all. The more you do online, the less need there is for paper.

     

22) A simple change during lunch can go a long way to reduce waste.  Bring your lunch in a reusable container instead of purchasing a new container from a restaurant.  A statistic to put it in perspective is “Once: the number of times that most of the more than 25 billion cartons manufactured in the U.S. are used.“  

33)  Reduce power consumption.  In our office the computer is used regularly for call handling.  A positive change for a computer is to utilize a green hard drive.  A green hard drive will have a spindle speed that is slower but will perform the same as a higher speed non green hard drive.  Another eco-friendly computer change is to use an eco-friendly power supply.  Some eco-friendly power supply providers can reduce power consumption by 33%!  Also, you can shut down lights that are not in use to reduce power consumption.  If office workers forget to turn off the lights, put a little reminder on the door so they see it on the way out.  Finally, replace your bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs qualified with the energy star.  These bulbs use 75% less energy than incandescent bulbs.   

44)  Recycle.  Start a recycle station at your work.  Make sure there are recycle bins for copy paper, newspapers and envelopes.  You should also make sure you have bins for cans, soda bottles and sandwich bags. 

These are just a few simple steps that we use at our answering service that any office can utilize.  After all, greener workplaces are not only efficient; they send a message of resilience, diligence and care to everyone at your business and to every customer you provide a service or product to.