As the world keeps moving towards a more eco-friendly lifestyle, a new type of business practice has arrived. Zero waste retail is a new trend for businesses—especially new businesses attempting to compete with larger and already established stores—to perform their activities while generating as little waste as possible.
In order to do that, these businesses are taking into consideration all the usual retail practices and transforming them into more viable, eco-friendly solutions to everyday problems. For example, getting rid of excessive packaging on their products, avoiding CO² emissions that contribute to global warming, encouraging customers to bring their own bags, or even having customer bring their own containers to select only the exact quantity they want to buy from bulk-style bins and dispensers.
More importantly, big businesses are starting to notice these practices, because it just makes sense in the long run. Usual methods are not only an ecological nightmare (it’s projected that the world will produce 7 million tons of solid waste every day by 2025) but also a costly waste of valuable resources that one way or the other impacts everyone’s profits.
Another good reason to push towards zero-waste in a business is that customers get increasingly aware of these practices—or the lack of—and are more willing to support businesses that hold on to best practices. This is the main reason small retail stores are making a dent in bigger corporations’ sales: they disrupt the market by creating awareness from the public, who in exchange would be more willing to support their local businesses.
Small retail businesses also have more room for innovation, for example adopting new payment systems like bitcoinaussiesystems.com. This flexibility lets them experiment with new technologies and fit customer needs.
Of course, corporations don’t like being labeled “the bad guys”, so their bottom line to adopt these practices are mostly to increase their profits, but if their objective matches the chance of reducing solid waste and helping the environment as a collateral benefit, I consider it a win-win.