How Are Tech-Forward Australian Companies Saving the Planet?

After several climate emergencies have been called by governments throughout 2019, even those people who did the minimum amount of recycling are beginning to realize that more needs to be done to protect and save the environment. One of the major ways that people feel they can make a difference is through their spending habits and their consumer decisions. While recycling is helpful, switching to companies who make a concerted effort to be eco-friendly will go further and will encourage other companies to follow suit.

Do people care about being eco-friendly? It turns out they do, especially when being eco-friendly can affect the company's stance when traded publicly. While market sentiment has a huge influence in the direction of trading company shares, attitudes to environmentalism have given companies that consider this as part of their ethos an edge over those that refuse to adapt. This change in attitude has influenced those with an open trading account to direct their interest to eco-friendly businesses when purchasing contracts for difference or other such trading options. Many are getting involved with green trading, which sees stock prices increase when green initiatives are announced and drop when evidence of dangerous environmental practices are unearthed. So, which companies in Australia are dominating the eco-friendly approach?

Melbourne was deemed Australia's tech capital, so it should be steaming ahead when it comes to innovative yet sustainable business HQs. Sustain Me is an eco-friendly app that helps customers identify how and where to recycle a variety of items. The company crowd-funded the capital to roll out the app nationally in 2016. Meanwhile, NatureMapr is an online platform that helps to track plants throughout the country, especially those which may be going extinct. The platform is even used by the ACT government conservation officers. Finally, Aussie-based Pollinate Energy is looking towards India to help it cultivate an eco-friendly image by providing sustainable energy solutions, while also allowing people to become energy entrepreneurs.

Making huge environmental changes costs a company money, and many mom-and-pop companies aren't able to make huge changes, such as the swap from palm oil to coconut oil, for example, without raising costs to consumers. But, for companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple, with a tremendous amount of capital, making eco-friendly changes shouldn't affect them too much. These companies should, therefore, be leading the way in their environmental approach, but are they? Well, based on the sectors their acquisitions are in, it could be argued that they are all looking at long-term strategies for making it easier to be eco-friendly through machine learning. The AI/machine learning acquisitions by the Big Four totaled around 70% of the major acquisitions made in the history of the companies. This shows a commitment to the future and to how technology will change to enable us to better steward the planet.

Being eco-friendly is important for businesses in all sectors to show that they are committed to protecting the planet. The larger and more successful the company, the more onus is placed on them to do so, with the avoidance of eco-friendly measures negatively affecting results from consumers for such companies.