Sustainable Signs and Their Broad Benefits: Green Signage Tips to Wow Your Clients, Part IV

One of the important things about business is calculating your return of investment (ROI) and when one thinks of ROI, sustainability often plays an important role. In June, we introduced our free white paper , 9 Green Signage Tips You Can Use to Wow your Clients, which highlights environmentally friendly practices you can consider when investing in a new sign and tips to help you use these practices to your business’ advantage.. You can download the version appropriate for you: Architects, General Contractors, Property Managers, and Everyone else. Now when you’re talking about signs, the environmental impact of a sign, manufacturing, maintenance and life cycle issues are as important as energy consumption. Some questions to keep in mind would include:

• How often will light bulbs be replaced?
• Will the sign ever need to be repainted?
• Where did the raw materials come from?

In many cases, you might have to help educate your client, or explain to a city official that your sign may be “greener” than they realize. An example of this would be the following: the environmental impact of manufacturing a sign that lasts for 10 years is about half of one that lasts for 5 years, longer lasting materials means fewer repairs, trips, etc. In other words, longer lasting signs have smaller carbon footprints. We’re sharing another tip from the white paper: sustainable signs are more than the sum of their parts.

LEDs in illuminated signs generally use less than half of the energy of older fluorescents, and last eight- to ten times longer. New T8 LEDs burn even cooler than the older T5s. Such features can be easy to overlook, but when added together, the green benefits are huge. More and more organizations are beginning to use Sustainable ROI (SROI) calculations that take into account more than financial returns, and that factor in much broader benefits.

You can get the other 8 free tips by downloading the appropriate white paper for yourself: Architects, General Contractors, Property Managers, and Everyone else.