Going green pays off: Sudbury businesses reaping financial rewards of sustainability.

• Author: Myers, Ella
• Position: GREEN REPORT

At Hiamedia Inc., they prioritize environmental sustainability, because "it's the right thing to do."

Skye Little owns the Sudbury-based design, print, and sign company, and said his personal views on environmental sustainability inspire his approach at work.

When Little was growing up in Whitefish, east of Sudbury, he remembers watching the local landfill rapidly fill up before closing completely when he was an adult.

It nailed the concept of "reduce, reuse, recycle," into the budding entrepreneur, and it's a philosophy that spans from his personal choices to his professional ones.

He said he takes care to prioritize them in that order too, reducing and reusing his and his company's consumption, before resorting to recycling with the leftovers.

Not only is it the right thing to do most of the time, said Little, it typically pays off financially.

Little uses an old Blackberry phone despite being offered regular upgrades, because he doesn't see the point in wasting a functional phone that will just produce more waste. He drives his cars until they no longer work, not worrying about the next new fad until he needs to.

At Hiamedia, Little reduces the company's impact by using innovative technologies.

They've invested in geothermal heating that he said translates one dollar of electricity into seven dollars of heat. It saves the company money and he anticipates their investment will pay for itself within seven years of its introduction.

A novel and unique Hiamedia sign design allows for the removal and reuse of coroplast signs so each piece of plastic gets twice the use it normally would.

Another addition to their arsenal allows them to reduce their ink and paper use, and helps facilitate recycling. Their direct-to-substrate printer means they don't have to apply stickers to the finished product, and the product can still be recycled after its use.

Recycling is a large part of what they do at Hiamedia; however, Little said that's one task that's driven completely by "doing the right thing" and not finances. The time to divide and sort recycling does cost the company a little, but Little said...