How Can Sustainability Help Your Bottom Line?

This blog was written by Communications Coordinator, Chloe Shore

Key Takeaways

Start with the savings that pay for themselves. Behavioural changes and small system upgrades often pay for themselves in a few years and fund bigger moves.
Renewables can save money and emissions. New solar and wind are among the cheapest sources of electricity, and federal tax credits cover up to 30% of the capital cost of eligible clean technology.
Customers, buyers, and investors increasingly look for ESG practices. If they aren’t asking you yet, they likely will be soon.
Sustainability improves staff retention. Employees, especially younger ones, increasingly weigh an employer’s environmental record when considering where to work.
Build long-term resilience. Understanding your resource dependencies and moving early on future regulations means less disruption and fewer surprises.

Why Should Businesses Incorporate Sustainability Into Their Operations?

For many, it starts with altruistic intentions, making your organization a force for good or even leading your industry in change that may be inevitable. But in budget discussions and capital planning, the altruism argument can fall short.

So how do you justify sustainability investment? In this blog, we break down how sustainability saves money, strengthens your competitive position, helps you keep staff, makes your business more resilient, and keeps you ahead of changing regulations. We’ll also look at case studies of Synergy clients that have used sustainability initiatives to save money and position themselves as sustainability leaders.

Does Sustainability Really Save Money?

Often, yes. The most reliable savings come from using less energy, water and material in the first place.

When new Synergy clients want to decarbonize, we typically recommend focusing on energy consumption, as it delivers the most direct reductions per implementation, and reductions are almost always available. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory analysis estimated that about one-third of US building electricity use could be saved at a cost well below the cost of buying that electricity, with a simple payback of roughly 2.5 years. The US EPA’s ENERGY STAR program says most companies that have done little to manage energy can easily achieve a 10% reduction in energy consumption early in an energy program. Consider what a 10% reduction in your energy bill would save your organization per year.

Payback and reductions vary with the project. Some initiatives are as simple as replacing light bulbs, while others are more complex building retrofits. While building-wide upgrades are more likely to deliver the biggest savings over time, the initial investment cost doesn’t always match the greatest savings. Smaller initiatives can often add up to big savings. That is why we recommend starting with a simple energy assessment to get real data on which initiatives will deliver the most “bang for your buck” and support sustainability initiatives in budget discussions.

Case Study: CRD Water Assessments

The Capital Regional District’s (CRD) water assessment program shows how much a few pieces of equipment can add up to. Under the region’s Water Conservation Bylaw, the CRD will prohibit once-through cooling (OTC) systems connected to the regional water supply after July 1, 2028. These systems run municipal water through equipment like ice machines and walk-in coolers once and send it straight down the drain. To help businesses get ahead of the deadline, the CRD introduced a rebate for equipment replacement and asked Synergy to build an individual business case for each site. Across seven businesses, including a hotel, restaurants, pubs, a brewery, and a specialty retailer, Synergy identified combined annual water savings of 22,306 m³ and annual cost savings of $122,852 from replacing OTC equipment with air-cooled alternatives, before accounting for the CRD’s rebate. Payback periods ranged from 0.7 to 3.45 years, with five-year returns on investment as high as 582%. These savings came from equipment upgrades alone, with no change in staff behaviour, and they make a strong case for upgrading even without the regulatory deadline.

Read The Full Case Study

Will Investing in Renewables Save Money Long-Term?

Renewables are the future, and while the upfront capital can feel like a deterrent, they provide long-term return on investment (ROI) and are financially competitive compared to relying on utility providers. If your business owns a large campus or area of land, here’s why you should assess your site for future renewable investments:

Rebates, Tax Credits & Funding: There are many financial incentives to help your business assess or install renewable energy. BC Hydro offers a regularly updated list of rebates and funding opportunities worth a regular scan. The Government of Canada also released the federal Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit, which is refundable at up to 30% of the capital cost of eligible equipment. That covers renewable generation, stationary storage, low-carbon heating, geothermal systems and more.

Benefits of Geothermal: Natural Resources Canada notes that an ENERGY STAR certified ground-source heat pump uses 45% less energy on average than a standard model and can be used in more extreme climates than air-source heat pumps. For organizations with large campuses like airports, geothermal can be a great way to decarbonize, especially for cold-climate airports.

Average Payback period: Commercial solar installers in Canada commonly cite annual returns of roughly 8–15% and payback periods of about 6–10 years on systems that last 25 years or more. That means roughly 15 years of “free” electricity for your business before upgrades are needed.

Returns vary by province and site, so we recommend a feasibility assessment before committing capital. A solar pre-feasibility assessment models production, costs, incentives, payback and levelized cost of energy, so you can see the numbers first.

Case Study: Kelowna Airport YLW

Kelowna International Airport (YLW) shows how a pre-feasibility assessment can turn “should we consider solar?” into a plan. YLW has set targets of carbon neutrality by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2040 for the emissions it controls, and it needed to know where solar could go, how much it could produce, and whether it would pay off before committing capital. Between 2024 and 2025, Synergy completed three assessments covering a new building, a terminal expansion, and the airport’s unused land and parking lots. The first led to YLW’s first on-site solar generation: rooftop panels on its new Operations & Emergency Services Building, installed in 2025 and cited as one of the actions behind the airport’s Airport Carbon Accreditation Level 3 recognition. The work required very little data from YLW’s team, and the reports provide leadership with analysis to support capital planning and funding applications.

Read The Full Case Study

Where Should Companies Start Decarbonizing?

We always recommend the easy, low-cost initiatives first. They are often behavioural or small system upgrades, and their savings can fund the larger projects. Typical examples include:

Tuning HVAC schedules and setpoints
Switching to LED lighting and controls
Fixing leaks and installing efficient fixtures
Metering energy and water so you can see where waste is
Reducing waste and over-ordering through better procurement

Competitive Advantage

Customers are increasingly looking for sustainable options and want to see your organization taking steps to minimize its impact. In Booking.com’s 2026 Travel & Sustainability Report, 85% of travellers surveyed said sustainable travel is important or very important to them, and this sentiment led to over 100 million room nights at third-party certified sustainable properties in 2025.

These trends continue beyond tourism. EY’s Future Consumer Index found that 69% of Canadian consumers expect companies to solve sustainability issues, and 61% planned to pay more attention to the environmental impact of what they consume.

Together, these numbers show that people are paying attention to which organizations take real action, so sustainability helps you stand out, win customers and stay relevant as expectations keep rising.

Staff Retention and Attraction

Employees notice which employers take sustainability seriously. Deloitte’s 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that more than half research an employer’s environmental impact before accepting a job, one in six have changed jobs or sectors because of climate concerns, and about a quarter plan to.

Those two groups make up a growing share of the workforce, so an employer’s environmental record increasingly shapes who applies, who accepts an offer, and who stays. Replacing a good employee is expensive, so even a small retention improvement is worth real money.

Case Study: Pacific Northwest Transportation Services

This is evident in the work of Pacific Northwest Transportation Services (PNWTS), a regional division of SSA Marine. Operating in a commercial transit industry traditionally plagued by chronic driver shortages, PNWTS pivoted its corporate identity to lead with eco-responsibility. By becoming North America’s first B Corp-certified ground transportation company, cutting fleet emissions by 48% through renewable fuels, and embedding environmental stewardship into its recruitment pipeline, the company bridged the recruitment gap and saw a significant increase in staff retention.

See PNWTS Environmental Page

Business Resiliency

Sustainability also means building a business that holds up when conditions change, as they are with the changing climate. The Insurance Bureau of Canada reports that insured losses from catastrophic weather and wildfires totalled $14 billion between 2006 and 2015 and $37 billion between 2016 and 2025, nearly triple the earlier decade. That reaches businesses through premiums, disrupted operations and damaged supply chains. And it’s not just from environmental damage. The World Economic Forum estimates that $44 trillion of economic value generation, over half of global GDP, is moderately or highly dependent on nature, meaning no matter how disconnected your business may seem, climate and ecological disruptions will affect everyone.

Tools like a GHG inventory or a TNFD (nature-related) assessment show you where those dependencies and impacts are in your business, and help you address them in a way that strengthens your business resilience.

Staying Ahead of Regulation

Regulation keeps moving, and businesses that have already changed handle it with far less disruption. For example, B.C.’s Single-Use and Plastic Waste Prevention Regulation came into effect in December 2023 and was phased in over time. Businesses that had already moved away from single-use items kept operating as usual. Those that hadn’t had to scramble to find alternatives, change suppliers and rework their service.

Environmental claims are also becoming more regulated. Canada’s Competition Act now requires companies to substantiate what they say, and the EU has similar rules coming. Our blog on the impact of new regulations on sustainability claims explains what this means for businesses and how to navigate these claims, but the key takeaway is that every sustainability claim you make must be backed with real data.

Whatever the specific rules are, the direction is clear: more disclosure, more accountability, and higher expectations. Getting your data and strategy in order now costs less than doing it under deadline.

Conclusion

Sustainability doesn’t have to be an either/or choice between the planet and your budget. The fastest returns come from efficiency, which often pays back in a few years. Renewables are increasingly competitive, with federal incentives improving the numbers. And the benefits that are harder to put on a spreadsheet, like customer preference, staff retention, resilience and regulatory readiness, build over time and are hard to build in a hurry.

The first step is understanding where you stand. A GHG inventory, TNFD assessment, energy audit, or feasibility assessment shows you where the savings are and which actions deliver the best return.

If you want to find cost savings and opportunities in your own operations, Contact Us. We help organizations measure their footprint, identify the highest-return actions, and build a plan that makes financial sense.