Green Contracts 101
All business owners sign contracts, and some even read them before filing them away. If you do nothing more than this, you are missing an opportunity to protect your business and advance your green goals.
If green issues are important to your products, you should be sure you address them in your contracts. For example, if you manufacture a product that you label organic, all of the ingredients should be organic. You should require your suppliers to promise in their contracts that the ingredients you are buying from them are organic and that they’ll pay you for any damages you may suffer (through bad publicity or lawsuits from consumers) if they’re not. Other examples of promises that should be memorialized in contracts include promises by suppliers not to use specific ingredients in their products, performance promises for energy efficient products, and promises relating to recycled content.
Your expectations regarding sustainability issues can also be addressed in your contracts. Many larger companies are requiring their suppliers to make promises about their own recycling and energy reduction efforts. If you are contracting with someone, you can make them promise to meet certain green goals, such as recycling a certain percentage of the paper in their business, using energy efficient light bulbs, or reducing travel energy consumption.
These examples are just a taste of the ways that contracts can be used to ensure that your products or services are as green as you think they are.
Tags: anna mills, contracts, green business