Sustainability drives competitiveness. Protecting environmental resources and cutting carbon is good for business, boosting your credentials with customers, suppliers, staff and investors. Explore the benefits of sustainable business practices. Learn how our sustainability specialists can help you work more efficiently, build resilience, and seize low carbon opportunities.
What is sustainability?
Business sustainability can help future-proof your business in the face of climate and nature challenges. It can also help you take advantage of the significant business opportunities related to these challenges.
Adapting to a net zero world brings change — but also opportunities. Cutting carbon and adopting sustainable business practices not only reduce business costs but also drive innovation, competitiveness and new ways of working.
Practical support for your business
Developing sustainable business practices will minimise the environmental impacts of your business, protect your business from risks and help you build business resilience.
Our sustainability specialists can provide a tailored plan to help you:
Improve the efficiency of your premises, products or processes
Cut costs
Investigate renewable energy options
Respond to future challenges
Take advantage of climate change and net zero opportunities
We offer hydrogen expert support to companies that want to grow by moving into the emerging hydrogen sector. Our industry specialists can offer support for your business, no matter its size or type.
We can help you to:
Understand if your company's capabilities can be transferred to the hydrogen sector to expand your market
Understand the potential benefits of turning to hydrogen, such as the ability to maintain or increase your turnover, workforce, and facilities
Get in touch if you're looking to grow and diversify your company in the low carbon energy field.
Find guidance and apply for the SME Loan Fund opens in a new window on the Business Energy Scotland website. This is a fund from the Scottish Government which can be used to install energy efficient measures such as lighting and heating upgrades, double glazing, insulation and much more.
SEPA, in partnership with the Northern Ireland Environment Agency has created NetRegs, providing environmental guidance for businesses in Northern Ireland and Scotland.
The dedicated website provides free advice, guidance and online tools about environmental regulations and how to comply with them.
There's never been greater awareness of the need to reduce emissions for the good of the planet, or a better time to start.
The UN’s Race To Zero is a global campaign bringing together businesses, cities, regions and investors to help create a healthy, resilient and zero-carbon recovery. More than 3000 businesses across the globe have already signed up to the initiative.
Cookies help Scottish Enterprise (“SE”, “us” or “we”) to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allow us to improve our website. We assume that you are happy to receive all the cookies in the categories that you elect to allow, or which are strictly necessary for the operation of our website. You can change your cookie settings at any time.
Strictly necessary cookies
These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website.
Cookie name
Purpose
Expiry
DS_SEC_Necessary_AllowedCookies
This cookie is used to record your preferences in regard to accepting marketing, performance or functionality cookies across the site.
1 year
se_session
This cookie is used to provide secure access to SE website features such as address lookup and form validation/submissions.
When browser is closed
Performance and analytics cookies
They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
Third party service
Purpose
Where to find out more
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps us analyse the behaviour of users on our site, such as which pages they view, how long they spend on each page, and which elements they interact with.
Hotjar helps us analyse the behaviour of users on our site by collating data into heatmaps, scrollmaps and other visual representations. It also allows us to add short surveys to the site.
Our website carries embedded ‘share’ buttons to enable users of the site to easily share articles with their friends through a number of popular social networks. These sites may set a cookie when you are also logged in to their service. Scottish Enterprise does not control the dissemination of these cookies and you should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.
Similarly, Scottish Enterprise sometimes embeds photos and video content from websites such as YouTube and Flickr. As a result, when you visit a page with content embedded from, for example, YouTube or Flickr, you may be presented with cookies from these websites. Scottish Enterprise does not control the dissemination of these cookies. Again, you should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.
Scottish Enterprise will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you. However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by Scottish Enterprise websites, or any third party websites, you can do this through your browser settings. The Help function within your browser should tell you how.
Alternatively, you may wish to visit the About cookiesopens in a new window website, which contains comprehensive information about cookies and how to restrict or delete cookies on a wide variety of browsers.
Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of the Scottish Enterprise website.
Scottish Enterprise and our other websites use a number of suppliers who set cookies on our behalf in order to deliver the services that they are providing. We are constantly reviewing our use of cookies and, as such, this cookies policy will be regularly renewed to include up to date information about the cookies used by our suppliers. We would highly recommend that you check this page on a regular basis.
