This is the latest of a series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:

Slightly obscure title, but it refers to the fact that when you buy a drill, what you are actually after is the holes it will produce, not the drill itself.

So, for example, instead of buying solvent, you can buy solvent services: provision, monitoring and disposal/recycling. The environmental difference is that the provider and you have the same interest: more service, less material, less waste, compared to the straight ‘buy a product’ scenario where the more you waste, the more profit they get. You can do this with anything from transport to carpets.

The technical term for this is a ‘product service system’.