BRAC Green Enterprises: bringing green solutions to the corporate world

A major initiative of sustainable businesses is to eliminate or decrease the impact made on the environment by harmful chemicals, materials, and waste generated by processes to manufacture products and services. The impact of such human activities, in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, can be measured in units of carbon dioxide often referred to as the “carbon footprint”. On a higher level, sustainable business practices can include reviewing processes in order to eliminate or recycle waste, making all products recyclable, and eliminating the use of non-renewable resources via alternative energies.

Sustainable businesses, or green businesses, are enterprises that have no negative impact on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy. In general, business is described as green if it incorporates principles of sustainability into each of its business decisions, supplies, environmentally friendly products or services and is greener than traditional competition.

BRAC Green Enterprises, with its enduring commitment to environmental principles in its business operations, is participating in environmentally friendly activities to ensure that all processes, products, and services adequately address current environmental concerns. BRAC Green Enterprises is a combination of three enterprises, which work under an umbrella to provide green solutions for the corporate urban market: BRAC Solar Enterprise works for power solutions, BRAC Nursery for landscaping and plant rental, and BRAC Recycled Paper for office stationeries. Together, this group of green enterprises is engaged in the production of environment-friendly products, and are consequently aiding in the social uprising of green initiatives in both rural and urban communities. This initiative in our opinion is unique – many enterprises in the renewable energy sector sell exiting products in existing markets, but BRAC Green Enterprises has introduced a complete office solution and its widespread usage can accelerate the process of greening the corporate world in our country.

BRAC Solar Enterprise started its journey towards rural electrification through solar home systems in 1998. The enterprise, in collaboration with the Infrastructure Development Company Ltd, has so far installed 73,000 solar home systems all over Bangladesh. As a part of its responsibility towards society, BRAC Solar has come up with energy-efficient and affordable solar solutions, which is now being offered to customers in rural, semi-urban and urban areas. BRAC Solar is using micro-inverter technology, which dramatically improves the performance, decreases the cost by 50% and saves energy by as much as 90%. For Office Solution, BRAC offers line-UPS and can uninterruptedly run valuable office equipment like computers, switches, hubs, routers, and other crucial office electronics. Additionally, this system can illuminate office interiors. In 2011, BRAC Solar has proudly participated in 2nd Solar Bangladesh 2011 Fair, which has recently been hosted at Bangabandhu International Conference Center on October 13th-15th.

BRAC Nursery focuses on the importance of global social aspect of “greening” and environmental improvement of the office and workspace. Additionally, the popularity of interior office landscaping has grown heavily in the last three decades, so we speculate that this endeavor has come at an opportune time. Recently, with the objective of taking green everywhere in the city of concrete, BRAC Nursery has introduced a range of indoor and pot plants, as well as landscaping services for homes and businesses. BRAC Nursery now runs commercial activities to increase awareness in creating a greener planet. The enterprise aims to increase the number and variety of trees in Bangladesh, to meet the nation’s basic needs for timber, fuel and fruit, as well as to restore the ecological balance. This year, BRAC Nursery has been awarded the First Prize in the National Tree Plantation and Tree Fair by the Bangladesh Forest Department, Ministry of Environment and Forest.

For the last one decade, BRAC Recycled paper has been contributing towards the prevention of environmental degradation by producing recycled products for the corporate urban market. It produces synthesized paper products from recycled materials, such as used paper, stalks of wheat, hay, water, hyacinth, caustic soda, dye, barley, glue and cotton. These materials are gathered from various BRAC projects and branch offices, thus helping to reduce the amount of waste produced by BRAC.

Whether it is to light up your life or help your business to go green, BRAC Green Enterprises has a solution for you available at BRAC Kanon – an outlet that serves the green solutions for your office. For more information, you can visit BRAC Kanon at 205/1/B Gulshan Tejgaon Link Road (opposite of Gulshan Aarong), Dhaka.

by Ashik Imtiaz and Shams Ahmed (Interns, BRAC Communications)