How To Cut Down On Transportation Costs In Your Green Business

How can I cut down on transportation costs in my green business?

Buy Local. If there's one thing that you can do, find a local manufacturer. Not a broker, not an importer. Find a local manufacturer of the good or service that you're buying. Does it make sense to have a pencil made in China, that's shipped over here and distributed fifteen times before you buy it? You can actually find a local pen and paper company here that is manufacturing the product. Or better yet, office furniture. If you can find a local supplier, the idea is to try to buy local. That's the first impact. That's the first line of defence. If you can't find local, why can't you buy it used? What's the difference between having the latest, greatest Mac? I love my Mac, but it's okay to buy it used. It's still going to work. You're still going to extend the lifespan of it. Why not buy a used office chair? What is the difference between you sitting in it five times, and someone else selling it to you and he sat in it a hundred times? It's an office chair. Also affecting our transportation are little things such as doing electronic fund transfers on the internet. Why do you have to write a check, put it in an envelope, put a stamp and then give it to the mail carrier who is going to burn fossil fuels, when you can just hit a couple of keys of a button and get it paid? Those are things that are important in terms of affecting the transportation. When you design products and you're bringing it to market, it's so important to make sure when you design it, that you package it correctly and you can scale it down. So you're not using a volume O.K, of space to transport your product. Try to sell as much product as you can locally. You know it goes both ways, buy locally and sell locally as much as you can. And those are things that I think can impact transportation.