Welcome again to my sustainability series, where I write about changes I’m making in my life to lessen my ecological footprint. Hopefully this series is inspiring some changes in the lives of others, and at the very least it’s holding me accountable.
This week I’m sharing some of the ways in which I work to make a smaller environmental impact with my business.
Perhaps one of the biggest influences over my feelings on running a product based business come from the retail jobs I’ve had over the past decade. I’ve worked for both small businesses and big corporations, but noticed many of the same trends in both. One of my earliest memories from the first retail job I had at 15 was my astonishment at the amount of plastic packaging waste that was thrown in the dumpster each day. I remember expressing my surprise and disappointment to the manager, who told me I should do something to change it when I grew up.
The amount of plastic waste being created was something that always bummed me out, but there were other aspects of these businesses that I’m just starting to explore deeply now, with the creation of my own product based business. The mass consumption of stuff is something that we’ve all grown so accustomed to, and working in the retail industry you become numb to it even though you have a front row seat to it. In fact, our goal as sellers of stuff is to encourage people to buy more and more so that at the end of the day we can write down a big number on our sales sheets – it’s all about money. I was working to make money, the owners of the businesses were trying to make money, and the brands we carried were trying to make money. And we all were making money, but with very little thought towards how much it was costing to the people making the goods or how much it was costing to the planet.
This is a cycle that I’ve contributed to as a consumer for my whole life, and in so many ways continue to, but this sustainability series is my effort to rethink and change the ways that I contribute to it. The last couple of posts have been about how I’m changing my everyday life, but I feel those actions are negated if I don’t make changes in my business.
In the beginning of this post I had planned to write about the little changes I’ve made already within svPhoenix Studio. Actions that I’m taking in my life that I’m also taking in my business – such as focusing on buying secondhand items instead of new, or recycling paper scraps and not buying from mega paper mills. But these are just a few small actions, and the truth is – I’m just at the beginning of figuring out how to do this. How do I run a values-driven business that does good for people and the environment AND make money? What does that look like in an art business? Is it even possible?
I think the answer is yes, it is possible. But it’s going to take a lot more thinking and learning and doing.
So- this is the part where I ask for suggestions! If you have any book/podcast/blog recommendations I would love to hear them. Or if you know businesses that are doing amazing things that I should check out, send their websites my way! ;
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back with another post on the blog in two weeks 🙂