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Posted By Julian Wilkinson
We are interested in finding out about the ISO 14001 certificate for our business. My understanding is that you need to have an environmental management system in place and be seen to be be doing the right things for the environment, measure your carbon footprint, sustainability, recycle, efficient energy use etc etc.
Being a financial institution would this route be:
- the right one for us to take?
- is there a more suitable green accreditation/award ect that perhaps we could achieve?
- how do the costs work for the ISO 14001?
I have been on the ISO 14001 website but would prefer some more information prior to contacting them. I would appreciate any information on this matter
Thanks
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Posted By Alan Hewett
Julian,
You could have a look at BS 8555 aka Project Acorn.
Regards,
Alan
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Posted By Julian Wilkinson
Brilliant! thanks for that, seems a good starting point
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Posted By Bob Youel
You can install a basic none accredited EMS at little cost
If you need to find out what an EMS is my next advice falls in nicely - obtain the services of a competent person re environmental areas
as otherwise you could become unstuck
Good luck
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Posted By Julian Wilkinson
Hi Bob,
thanks for the advice, yes we have carried out various EMS surveys and implemented quite a few ideas. One being we have requested the Carbon Trust to carry out an energy survey which should help us measure our carbon footprint etc. By the way the Carbon Trust offer a free survey to those who have an energy spend over 50k pa
cheers
Julian
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Posted By Aggi Katniak
Hi Julian
ISO 14001 is an internationally recognised standard that can be used in any organisation. So even if you are a small office-based company it can work well for you. Your documentation does not need to be complex.
There are lots of benefits but as I always keep telling people, standards are only tools and at the end of the day it's up to you how you use it.
Small companies usually get a consultant to help them.
You also have to choose a certification body, preferably an accredited one )unaccredited certificate is worthless, you can print it off yourself).
Costs will depend on number of audit days and daily rate (usually between £500-1000). Number of audit days will depend on a few things: no. of employees, number of sites, size of site, complexity etc.
Assuming you are an office-based small company you are thinking about one audit day per year.
So the certification costs are pretty small.
The most important thing is to get a good consultant (assuming you don't have resources internally) that will help you to build a simple yet robust system.
Let me know if you have any other questions, I can help.
Aggi
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Posted By DavidW
Depending on the size of your organisation either 14001 or the Acorn scheme may help. The acorn Scheme is aimed at smaller companies that want to move towards 14001 in bite size chunks. If you're not sure about 14001 then the cheapest option to start with is to buy a copy of the standard from someone like IEMA or BSI. The other thing to remember is that you can self certify to 14001, although clearly for external customers this may not be as valuable as an external certification body auditing your system. The big advantage of a formal EMS is that it forces you to set aims and objective to continually improve your environmental performance and puts in place the processes to gather the evidence that performance has improved.
If you need any more detailed info then happy to help.
Best of luck.
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Posted By AF
Why not contact your local business enterprise to establish if support (% funding & personnel) is available.
Up here in scotland, I have used local enterprises who have contributed up to 50% of the financial outlay required as part of ISO 14001 implementation (this covered the costs of training, audits, consultancy & accreditation fees).
Totally surprised at a previous comment, that it would cost you nothing to implement ISO 14001 - I would disagree, however the initial outlay from your company & the financial support from the local enterprise can be recovered from the savings made from reducing waste & energy (amongst other things)
Alex
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Posted By Julian Wilkinson
thanks for all your responses. The information has been well received
Regards
Julian
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