BUSINESS JOURNAL EVENT

2008 Health Care Conference: Frontiers of Health Care

Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 8:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., Hyatt Vineyard Creek Hotel & Spa, Santa Rosa

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Business Environmental Alliance can help business

FOUR-STOP GUIDE OFFERED TO GETTING STARTED; AWARDS RESOURCES ALSO AVAILABLE

Are you a small business looking to go green?

While many agree that going green makes good business sense, it is less clear how to start. The Sonoma County Business Environmental Alliance (BEA) is committed to assisting you. Here is a four-step guide from the BEA to lead you on your way.

1. Start by “greening” your company policy. The BEA’s most recent report shows that more than 97 percent of businesses have adopted some environmentally friendly practices, but only 29 percent have an environmental policy statement. An environmental policy statement provides a unifying vision of environmental principles that will guide the actions of employees and management. It clarifies for staff, suppliers, customers, stakeholders, directors and the community where the company stands on the environmental matters.

In addition, an environmental policy can boost staff morale and provides a model that can be modified and improved as technology and innovation increase the cost incentives of conservation.

A series of nine BEA How-to guides will direct your business through becoming more environmentally conscious. These guides cover everything from writing an environmental policy statement (How-

to No. 1), to educating your employees (How-to No. 5), to developing continual action plans (How-to No. 8). All How-to guides are available for free online at www

.sonomabea.org/how_to_guide.

2. Greening your operations is made easier with BEA assistance. Energy consumption, water use and waste production are three key areas where businesses impact the environment. To better understand your actions in these key areas, you need resource-use assessments. These assessments show businesses how much they are using in terms of energy consumption, water use, waste production and, correspondingly, greenhouse gas emissions.

Assessments also inform businesses about ways to maximize their resource-use efficiency and include voluntary action plans to help guide you through environmental best practices.

The BEA’s Business Water Project offers free water assessments to businesses and has been completing these assessments for years. The BEA will also point you to free energy and waste assessments offered by your service providers. The BEA can also refer your business to local nonprofit groups offering help with carbon analysis and greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Adopt green best practices and be certified as a Sonoma County Green Business. Adopting sound environmental practices can benefit your business in several ways; not only do they reduce your costs but they also add value to your product, your workspace, staff morale and daily operations.

The Sonoma County Green Business Program, currently in a pilot program authorized by the County Board of Supervisors, will soon be able to certify your business as following environmental best practices. The certification, offered at no charge, involves a rigorous assessment of water conservation, waste diversion, energy efficiency and pollution-prevention practices.

The Green Business certification will tell the world that you are doing your part – and help you tell your customers about your environmental commitment. This free and rigorous certification of waste, energy, water and pollution-prevention practices will show customers that your environmental commitment rises above “greenwashing” and has been independently certified by a nine-county wide Bay Area program.

Find out more information about the Sonoma County Green Business program at www.sonomagreenbusiness.org.

4. Receive recognition for your environmental best practices in other ways. Let us know what you are doing, and we can help you get the word out. The BEA promotes businesses in several ways, first at its annual Business Breakfast.

Each year, local chambers of commerce and trade groups nominate an award winner to be presented at our annual BEA Business Breakfast. This year’s breakfast, Feb. 29 at the Doubletree Hotel in Rohnert Park, recognized more than a dozen Sonoma County businesses for saving money by implementing environmentally friendly best practices.

Secondly, the BEA publishes a quarterly newsletter, The Bottom Line. The newsletter highlights Sonoma County companies adopting innovative environmental strategies, from the large scale of wineries sharing waste water treatment facilities to the small scale of accounting offices collecting batteries from its employees for recycling.

Finally, the BEA’s annual Best Practices Report pairs these qualitative stories about best practices with quantitative data, showing how your company measures up to other companies in Sonoma County. The most recent copy of each of these publications is available at www.sonomabea.org/publications.

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Scott Kirk is an attorney with Beyers Costin in Santa Rosa and is co-chair of the Business Environmental Alliance. For more information and assistance, please visit www.sonomabea.org or contact Jennifer Henry at 707-565-7257, jhenry@sonoma-county.org.