St Patricks Day 2022 is coming up, and what better way to celebrate our national holiday than to announce VIMAR is going Green! We believe if something is good for the environment, then it’s good for business.

Ireland has a target to reduce carbon emissions (greenhouse gas emissions) by 51% by 2030 and to achieve a climate-neutral economy by 2050. In order to do this, businesses are encouraged to invest in a greener future, through sustainable products, services and business models.

Increasingly, businesses around the world are responding to a global imperative and consumer demand to go green. More than 80% of people surveyed in one report stated they respect companies and brands that adopt eco-friendly practices.

“Consumers want to make responsible ‘green’ purchases, but do not always have the means to do so.” one marketing report says. For brands, this is an opportunity. An opportunity to help improve the planet for future generations while simultaneously becoming more appealing to potential customers.

Green For Micro and VIMAR Digital Marketing

The Green for Micro programme is a new initiative from the Local Enterprise Offices. It is designed to help prepare businesses for the low carbon, more resource-efficient economy of the future.

The team at Green For Micro recently visited our office in Portlaoise, Co Laois and created a report that outlined opportunities available for VIMAR to reduce our carbon footprint.

According to this report, the most significant improvement available to VIMAR Digital Marketing was to make use of ‘green’ hosting providers that use renewable energy and accredited offsets to reduce emissions.

Joining GreenGeeks Web Hosting

VIMAR are proud to announce that moving forward, we are transferring all our websites onto GreenGeeks hosting platform.

We are all aware that the Internet is currently a huge polluter of the environment. We made the decision to host all our websites on the leading eco-friendly web hosting provider available in order to make a positive impact on the environment and reduce our own carbon emissions.

The internet industry consumes enormous amounts of energy. The backbone of the internet is data centres which hold millions of large servers, stacked on top of each other in racks. They are powered up and running all day, every day.

Many of these servers are located in Ireland. In fact 40% of all of the energy used to power the internet is used specifically to keep these servers from overheating. The Internet is currently the fastest-growing carbon polluting industry and it will soon eclipse all other industries in terms of worldwide pollution.

As a result, GreenGeeks was founded to try solve this issue. GreenGeeks has been recognized by the United States Environmental Protection Agency since 2009 as a Green Power Partner. Green Geeks also work with One Tree Planted to plant trees across the globe. For every hosting account that they provide, they plant one tree.

These are just a few of the reasons why we at VIMAR decided to transfer our sites to GreenGeeks.

5 Steps Towards A Greener Office

VIMAR is a professional digital marketing agency selling digital solutions to a variety of businesses across Ireland. We don’t sell physical products, so we needed to discuss ways we could become more eco-friendly.

We decided that the best course of action we could take was to start small. Therefore, dream big, and start small. We asked ourselves, what could VIMAR do immediately to become more eco-friendly? Here is what we came up with.

1. Save Energy

Our teamwork with computers daily in our office, and at home. Energy use varies dramatically depending on the size and type of your business, but on average we know we probably use a lot. We are now conscious and more thoughtful when it comes to wasting power in our office.

We make sure all our equipment is turned off at nighttime and on our lunch breaks. We make sure lights and appliances are turned off when they’re not being used. We utilize our big windows to allow natural light into the office.

2. Use Less Paper

We already barely use any paper, but we decided to go the extra step and start actively trying to use even less paper. All our bills and invoices are now exclusively electronic.

Going paperless extends further than simply electronic billing though. To make our business more environmentally friendly, we try to avoid using paper and printing as much as possible. Virtual sign-off, fillable PDF forms and online ordering are just some of the other ways we use less paper.

3. Save Water

Saving water is a significant step towards being a more environmentally friendly business. At VIMAR, we use a dishwasher in the office kitchen and wash all the day’s dirty dishes together rather than individual office members washing them by hand throughout the day.

This alone significantly reduces the amount of water we use daily.

4. Recycle & Reuse

We all decided as individuals to start recycling and reusing. In our VIMAR office, we have the relevant recycling bins available and promote best eco practices within our staff. As a team, we also use reusable lunch packaging and reusable water bottles.

5. Green Space

At VIMAR, we believe our office should be a healthy environment. For both physical and mental health. A simple way to create a healthy, more environmentally friendly workplace is to make it greener. A famous study from NASA in the 80s concluded that humble house plants could successfully remove nasty chemicals such as benzene, trichloroethylene and formaldehyde from indoor air. Plants absorb the carbon dioxide we breathe out and release fresh oxygen back into the environment, which can cleanse the air at the same time.

At VIMAR, our office is full of air-cleansing greenery, pumping fresh oxygen into the environment and keeping the air we breathe fresh.

Leading By Example

As an eco-friendly business, we believe we should promote sustainability within our staff and community by getting involved in things like tree-planting events or community gardening projects is a great way to do our part in making the earth more eco-friendly.

For us at VIMAR, we understand that business in general, has some pretty big carbon footprints to fill, so we decided to personally take significant steps to make our company as eco-friendly as possible.