Green Sector Essay

Submitted By funofun
Words: 845
Pages: 4

1. General Overview:
Going green is becoming increasingly attractive as a business strategy. With the increasing of pollution but the decreasing of natural resources, green industry practices not only benefit environment because of lower carbon footprint, but also create cost saving, support government policies, and increase profitability for the companies. Trends in consumption, government policy, and costs all point towards even more green industry business opportunities in the years ahead (Green Industry Analysis 2012 – Cost & Trends, 2012).
Green industry focuses on making a profit without bring harmful impact (or even with beneficial impact) on the environment. Leaders make sustainability a key consideration in decision-making throughout the organization as they work to minimize both use and production of harmful chemicals, excess materials, and waste byproducts in the delivery of their goods and services. People realize the importance of our planet’s dwindling natural resources. Green industry seeks the goal of meeting the demands of today without compromising the needs o tomorrow. Green industry’s patterns are resource and energy efficient, low-carbon and low waste, non-polluting and safe, and producing products that are responsibly managed throughout their lifecycle (Green Industry Analysis 2012 – Cost & Trends, 2012).
By recognizing the potential profitability of going green, companies are taking steps, small and large toward greater sustainability. Green industries include organic food growing, providing energy efficiency, hybrid vehicles manufacturing, material recovery, recycling, waste management, solar energy utilization, etc (UNIDO Green Industry, 2011).
At the same time, consumers are becoming more educated about environment protection. They are interest in environmentally friendly business practices and products. Almost 50% of Americans valued environmental protection over economic growth, and more than 60% had purchased organic produce within the previous year. Consumers care much more than ever about green industry and have the resources to find the products that meet their requirements. Governments at the local and national level are supporting environmentally friendly businesses with incentives while pushing industry standards on pollution and emissions ever higher (UNIDO Green Industry, 2011).
2. The Structure of the Sector:
Green Business is classified into 3 categories: (O. Maslyukivska, 2011)
• Firms, whose activity is to produce environmental goods and services (the traditional environmental goods and services sector);
• Firms which have taken active and identifiable steps to change their products and/or processes to take sustainability into account (green companies/enterprises);
• All other firms which have some steps to improve process efficiency or chage their brand image.

Green Strategies of Consumption and Production: In Green Industry, enterprise should adopt business strategies to maximize resource efficiency and cleaner production. These strategies also called “Three Rs” strategies – Reduce, Recycle, Reuse. First, enterprise should maximize the efficiency of energy and raw materials using, adopting cleaner production, pollution prevention, green productivity, etc. Greater efficiency in the use of materials and energy also will reduce operating costs for enterprise. The cost of materials and energy normally take up 40%-60% of the operation costs. Then, enterprises could use renewable resources instead of non-renewable if possible, such as using biomass for fossil fuels in boilers, using solar energy for certain forms o drying, etc. Also, enterprises could try to maximize the recycling and