Can a Virtual Address Make My Business Green?
With a virtual address, you can make your company more environmentally sustainable. In particular, you can:
- Limit the use of paper and ink
- Reduce air pollution and fossil fuel consumption
- Establish offices without using up resources
Limit the use of paper and ink
An important contract arrives at an office. A dozen stakeholders need to see the document and some recent notes and letters related to it. An assistant gets the notes and letters, and feeds the notes, letters, and contract into a copier. Out come twelve sets of copies, a total of 600 pages – pages that contribute to environmental destruction.
Cutting down trees to make paper accounts for at least 13% of deforestation – some authorities put the number as high as 40% – and helps to cause global warming, species extinction, and water shortages. Printer ink and the plastic cartridges that feed it to your copier are environmentally dangerous to manufacture and throw away.
But after a contract arrives at a virtual address, digital mail professionals digitize it and upload it to a web portal. Also on the portal is every other document that’s come to your virtual address, stored for easy searching and retrieving. You can send these documents to stakeholders as digital files, not paper sheets. The process is fast, easy, inexpensive, and safe for the environment.
Reduce air pollution and fossil fuel consumption
A virtual address’s mailroom workers send mail to your phone or computer no matter where you are. You and your staff never have to drive to an office to pick up your mail. And delivery drivers never have to drive to the office, pick up your mail, and bring it to you.
The result is that your car (or the delivery driver’s car) doesn’t spend hours gulping gasoline and belching out smoke. Your usage of fossil fuels drops. So does the amount of pollution you’re creating.
Establish offices without using up resources
Office buildings use materials ranging from wood and steel in the walls to chemicals in the air conditioning. Mining, lumbering, and other processes for creating these materials deplete the planet.
The destruction doesn’t stop when construction does. A large office building uses 20 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 24 cubic feet of natural gas per square foot every year. Air conditioning produces greenhouse gases such as hydrofluorocarbons. “Buildings and construction together account for 36% of global final energy use and 39% of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions,” says a United Nations report.
But every time you opt for a virtual address rather than a physical office, you opt out of hurting the planet. The more virtual addresses you establish, the more you help to heal the world.
If you’d like your own virtual address, click here.