Small business owners have offered sustainability gurus every excuse in the book.
Their plans for eco-friendly infrastructure reforms were shelved because they were a resource drain … their 200-page-long PowerPoint presentation about energy efficiency was disregarded because, well, it’s 200 pages … they can’t even think about going green because it takes too much green.
But persistent advocates and now state initiatives are doing what they can to ease the process of implementing sustainability into a business — and show it’s the right thing to do for many reasons. Including the bottom line.
For Jeana Wirtenberg, sustainability has long been a no-brainer for small businesses.
As CEO of Transitioning to Green, a consulting and training company in Montville, she works to help businesses understand how these practices will lead to cost savings, talent attraction and an enhanced reputation.
“There’s many who still think that being sustainable is somehow anti-business,” she said. “That’s not true at all — in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a necessary part of any business with long-term goals.
“Research has shown that 95 percent of sustainable projects are either cost-neutral or positive in the long term. It’s misleading to say these things are (too expensive); when in fact, you’re going to save and make money.”
But not all of the state’s small businesses have gotten her memo.
A survey done by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Institute for Sustainable Enterprise, of which Wirtenberg is a co-founder, found larger companies are much more often adopting sustainable practices than smaller companies.
That means that a grand majority are lagging behind, given that small and midsized companies make up an estimated 90 percent of all New Jersey businesses.
That’s not for a lack of trying on the part of Wirtenberg, who has written two books about sustainability while launching initiatives aimed at supporting it through education and consulting services.
