Ways To Make Your Warehouse More Sustainable
It pays to value sustainability. Along with helping the environment, sustainable companies tend to see higher productivity and lower operating costs. Plus, your brand benefits when people learn about your eco-friendly efforts.
But some aspects of a business’s operations prove difficult to make sustainable. This often involves warehouses. Finding ways to make your warehouse more sustainable takes strategy and hard work, but it’s well worth it.
Building Considerations
Lighting
Some sources report that US warehouses consume as much as 6.1 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, adding up to about 13,400 Btu of natural gas. This costs businesses and the environment dearly. Consider these ways to make your warehouse lighting more sustainable:
Replacing metal halide lighting
Switching to LED lighting
Using fewer bulbs in the space
Utilizing skylights
Using timers and sensors
Heat and Cooling
Heating and cooling already takes a lot of energy, especially when it involves a space as massive as a warehouse. To make both heating and cooling more efficient, try using high-volume, low-speed fans. This will increase air circulation for warm months and push rising warm air down in the winter. Additionally, installing panel doors in your loading dock can help maintain the inside temperature.
Equipment Considerations
Sustainable Equipment
We usually try to cut down on electricity use when striving toward sustainability, but sometimes, electricity is the more eco-friendly option. For example, you can get an electric-powered forklift. Exhaust from diesel engine forklifts contributes to ground-level ozone and pollutants, which are dangerous for the environment and your employees. Electric forklifts produce no emissions.
Equipment Rentals
As your company considers which forklifts to acquire, they should also think about how they acquire them. Sustainability is just one reason to rent forklifts instead of buying them. Renting forklifts means fewer machines going into production, and your company doesn’t have to spend the resources and funds on maintaining machines when not in use.
