4 Steps for Small Businesses to Kickstart Your Sustainability Journey

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With the growing interest in sustainability in Singapore and globally, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should start to implement sustainable practices and strategies for their businesses. For SMEs who wish to be more sustainable, here are 4 steps to kickstart your sustainability journey.

1. Reduce Risks

Look at aspects of your operations that has environmental impacts and are material to your company. It could be the use of resources: energy, water, chemicals and materials. Or discharges to the environment such as wastewater, air and chemical emissions, and waste disposal.

If these resources and discharges are not handled properly, they could be a risk to your business due to fluctuations in prices of resources, over-dependency on suppliers, change in government regulations, change in consumer demands, legal issues and liabilities, and hazards to employees.

Start now by identifying your environmental risks, monitoring them regularly and reducing those risks over time.

Some questions on environmental risks that you might ask:

  • How much energy, water, materials and chemicals are we using?
  • What are the chemicals that are toxic and how are they handled?
  • How do we dispose or discharge wastewater, air emiisons, waste and used chemicals?
  • Are we meeting government regulations and how do we anticipate future regulations to change?
  • Are there incidents of leaks and spills of chemicals, and how can they be prevented?
  • Are we using too much resources and generating too much waste as compared to the industry norms? What happens if prices of the resources increase or disposal fees increase?
  • Do we depend only on resources from one or few suppliers, and are those resources sustainable and non-toxic?
  • Are our customers demanding for greener products or are more environmentally conscious?
  • What happens to our products after being used by our customers?

Keep track of those questions above and other relevant risks, and appoint someone or a team to monitor the potential risks. Take immediate actions to reduce the important and urgent environmental risks. And set a timeline to reduce other less important risks.

2. Reduce Costs

Look at your business operations and the use of resources that are material to your company, such as electricity, water, fuel, materials and chemicals. Monitor regularly on your fuel, material and chemical usage, water and electricity consumption, and waste disposed.






3. Increase Revenue



Find ways to reduce the environmental impacts of your products throughout its life cycle. In addition, you can ensure that your products meet certified eco labels, such as the Singapore Green Label or the Singapore Green Building Product label. This will enable your products to have a green premium over normal products but remember that it is still important to first meet the customer’s quality and cost needs.


4. Enhance Brand

After taking the previous 3 steps, SMEs will be in a better position to build up their reputation and enhance their brand as a sustainable company.




SMEs can enhance their brand as a sustainable company only after implementing the previous 3 steps, and also have to ensure that their green marketing is free of greenwashing.

We hope that these 4 steps will give SMEs some ideas on how to be more sustainable in their business and help them start their sustainability journey.

1 thought on “4 Steps for Small Businesses to Kickstart Your Sustainability Journey

  1. Hi there, I think you are very right saying costumers tend to choose eco-friendly products over normal ones, sometimes even if the green products cost more. I believe businesses that will see that opportunity today, will highly benefit from it in the future.

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