Incentives can help reduce and reuse.

Most of the time if people are presented with incentives that are good and inviting enough the tend to do things that they normally would not. I have a similar thought that if proper incentives can be provided we can make people live a more cleaner and greener life. I will try to list a few of my ideas below :

• Provide incentives for registering for e-bills and e-statements.All of us use mobile phones and credit cards and have bank accounts. The monthly account statements of credit cards and bank accounts and monthly bills of the phones are all generally sent to customers with some more printed material (mostly advertisements to recover the cost of sending the bills in most of the cases). Now if I have a phone bill, a credit card bill and a bank statement (most people actually may have more than 3-4 credit cards and more than 2-3 accounts, and also demat accounts etc.) So even by the most conservative calculation I would receive around 12-15 pages of printed material and envelopes. If I could register for electronic bills/statements for all these accounts I could help save the senders a lot of headache and lot of "paper" thereby reducing the usage of paper and saving trees in turn. But what If the company can pass on some of the benifit to me say even a 10 rupee reduction on my bill would encourage me to switch to e-statements rather than paper statements.

• Companies should encourage employees to use the public transport or shared transport (carpools?) so that they cause less pollution and less traffic on the roads. That would encourage people to use the public transport and will go a long way in solving many problems (traffic, pollution, undue usage of fuels..)
• Provide employees the option to work from home. This is a big winner in my opinion. Atleast some sectors can very easily adopt this model and can be a great incentive to the employee as well and will reduce a lot of traffic on the roads. There are going to be issues, but then those can be dealt with and specially if the companies already have a setup this can go a long way in improving employee satisfaction aswell.
• Conferences/Meetings should be encouraged to adopt a virtual model and encouragement should be given to conduct meetings/conferences virtually if that is possible. Because it can not only help people save a lot of travel time but also save a lot of fuel.