Last week, while waiting in line at a small coffee bar in Amersfoort, I watched a barista rinse the same cup three times before filling it with fresh water. Behind him, boxes of single-use plastic straws sat unopened. The irony was sharp: obsessing over drops of water while ignoring kilograms of waste. It struck me, many service companies behave the same way. They try to polish a detail, while leaving the bigger impact untouched.
THE WHY
If you run a service company in the Netherlands, whether it is an accounting firm, a design studio, or a recruitment agency, you might think environmental ethics belongs to factories and logistics hubs. Not to you. But clients, regulators, and even your own employees increasingly demand proof that you are not hiding behind the excuse of being “immaterial.” Governance is no longer about what you produce; it is about how you operate. Even the service sector leaves footprints, digital, physical, and cultural.
THE NUMBERS
Consider this:
- A single office workstation consumes on average 140 kWh per month and most Dutch service SMEs have more devices than staff.
- Printing 10,000 pages a year (not unusual for admin-heavy firms) equals over 1,000 liters of water used in paper production.
- Dutch SMEs together account for 63% of national energy consumption in the services sector, according to CBS figures.
Waste and inefficiency hide in daily routines: forgotten monitors left on overnight, pointless business travel, or “cloud waste” from unused digital storage. Each of these drains both resources and profit.
WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU
Here is the uncomfortable truth: most service entrepreneurs use “we don’t pollute like factories” as a psychological shield. It’s a myth. The real pollution of service companies is cultural, an indifference to the small habits that, multiplied by thousands of offices, shape national impact. Ethics is not only about installing LED lights or banning plastic bottles. It is about how leaders set a tone where accountability becomes the norm, not the exception. Staff will mirror what you ignore.
DECISION COMPASS
Ask yourself today:
- Do we know the real energy footprint of our office and digital systems?
- How many of our “default” habits (printing, commuting, cloud storage) could be redesigned without harming productivity?
- Are we transparent with clients about our own environmental choices, or do we stay silent out of convenience?
- Do we treat sustainability as a project or as part of governance, reviewed, audited, and improved like finance and compliance?
- Would we be proud if our children saw the way we run this company day-to-day?
FINAL REFLECTION
In the end, environmental ethics for service companies is not about grandeur or marketing. It is about the quiet discipline of aligning actions with values. A company that ignores its impact is like a person who leaves the tap running because “someone else will pay the bill.” The truth is: someone always does. Ethics in business is not measured by the absence of harm, but by the presence of care.
Co-Creator of Xtroverso | Head of Global GRC @ ZENTRIQ™
Paolo Maria Pavan builds systems that balance rules with freedom, clarity with transformation. In his third life, he writes and speaks openly about markets, governance, and risk, not as a trader chasing price, but as a reader of patterns, behaviors, and distortions. A serial entrepreneur shaped by failure and reinvention, he sees governance as a living force for trust and progress, and refuses to avoid the hard conversations that make it real.
