Sustainable Business Council offers Green Bay businesses nature-based sustainability solutions

GREEN BAY – The Sustainable Business Council in Green Bay is offering a six month program to boost the sustainability of up to ten businesses in the Green Bay area.

Beginning on April 10, the Green Bay Sustainable Business Accelerator will kick off and continue until the fall.

This grant-funded program is meant for small to mid-sized businesses in Green Bay; however, if there is room, the program will be opened for businesses in the surrounding area.
Program Manager at SBC, Christa Kananen, said, “We’re prioritizing companies within the city of Green Bay, really to support the Green Bay plans that exist in the Clean Energy and Green Stormwater Infrastructure plans, but we encourage folks in the greater Green Bay area to apply. If we have capacity, we will absolutely extend it outside of the city of Green Bay.”

The Clean Energy Green Bay plan that passed in 2023 was what catapulted this into action, with the city focusing on renewable energy and reducing emissions.

“In that plan it was identified that over 70% of communitywide emissions comes from commercial and industrial users,” Kananen mentioned.

She also said that there is a disparity between what larger businesses are able to accomplish compared to the small and mid-sized ones.

“A lot of the largest energy users in Green Bay are already leveraging existing resources to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, small to mid-size commercial and industrial energy users weren’t necessarily accessing those available resources in the same way,” Kananen remarked.

Resources being the time, funding and designated personnel able to tackle the project.
According to Kananen, this program is meant to bridge the gap as the program is free due to the grant they received to run it.

Focusing on a specific issue businesses want to fix is what the first part of the program is for, which she said is one of the hardest parts for businesses starting their sustainability efforts.

Businesses can discover larger opportunities, solutions and policy writing skills aiming at fixing one of several nature related efforts.

Energy usage and type, green house gases, waster, water, biodiversity and land usage are the main efforts.

The middle portion of the Green Bay Sustainable Business Accelerator focuses on choosing their nature based solution and actively implementing it in their business.

“The second portion of this accelerator is to actually choose a nature based solution from all the options we’ve identified or others. It doesn’t have to be something that we’ve brought, if there is something that they’ve thought of that they could do at their facility,” Kananen said.

Because of this aspect, she said there is one barrier to entry, “Companies have to have decision making control over their facility and land use. They don’t have to own their building or their property, but they have to be able to decide what happens to it because the nature based solution aspect of the cohort will require something to happen in nature surrounding their building.”

In September and October, businesses will celebrate their achievements and impacts on not only their businesses but the community as a whole.

Kananen thinks of this program as a service to the community, not just businesses.

“It really is at its heart a service to the community. The Sustainable Business Council is a nonprofit, so we are mission driven and our goal is to help advance sustainability, both in terms of strategic implementation and tactical implementation of sustainability.”

When asked about the benefits to the participating businesses, Kananen said, “Larger companies are increasingly requiring their suppliers to engage in sustainability, to quantify the impacts of their action on the environment and their communities and to disclose that information.”

Additionally, she claimed that there are several benefits economically for businesses, “There is a ton of economic benefit to sustainability, both in current market conditions but also in identifying and managing social and environmental risk.”

When it comes to energy, she noted, “A lot of companies kind of treat it as something that they don’t have a lot of control over, right? It happens to them. They pay the rates that they are levied.”

Kananen said that businesses can influence how much energy they are going to need or the types they use and it’s the same with waste and water management and this can help them take control.

The Greater Green Bay Chamber of Commerce will host the bi weekly meetings on Friday afternoons from April to June

The deadline for businesses to apply for the free program is March 27.

To learn more, visit sustainablebusinesscouncil.org.

To apply for a spot visit wisconsinsustainability.com/gbaccelerator.