The Importance Of Environmental Performance To Your Business

What Is The Environmental Performance Of Your Organisation?

With global warming on the increase, climates changing across the world and natural resources enduring more strain than ever, it’s becoming increasingly important for businesses to take their environmental performance seriously. No matter how big or small your firm is, the impact it has on the local and wider environment can potentially be damaging.

With this in mind the environmental performance of your business can be split into several parts:

– How you utilise raw materials including water and other natural resources
– Your energy use and any environmental impact it may have
– The levels of waste and pollution coming out of your business
– The affect your business will have on employees, the local community and the wider environment

These points go hand-in-hand with your business’s overall sustainability. By considering them throughout the lifecycle of your product or service, as well as at each step of the supply chain, your business will be well positioned and environmentally conscious.

Why Measure Environmental Performance?

It isn’t enough to just know what it means though. You must act upon it too. As if the social and environmental importance isn’t enough, there are also many business reasons that will ensure measuring environmental performance is a worthwhile activity.

Think about it. If your business isn’t making enough sales, you’ll want to understand why. Once you’ve measured and interpreted your sales data you’ll implement whatever changes are needed to improve activity and conversions. It’s exactly the same when it comes to environmental performance. You need to measure it, to understand it. Once you understand it, you can improve it.

Here are some of the key areas which can be measured to help enhance your business’s environmental performance:

– Cost Savings – If you’re using too much energy or wasting too many raw materials, it will be costing your business money. By looking at these things closely and measuring performance accordingly, you’ll be able to identify and implement savings.
– Legal Compliance – As environmental performance becomes more and more important, the HSE has many policies surrounding environmental performance, waste, pollution and many others. Having a robust environmental performance system in place will help reduce issues and avoid fines or penalties.
– Enhanced Status – By managing your environmental performance there is potential to win more work and bid on bigger and better tenders. Corporate responsibility and sustainability can be important factors for potential clients, partners, investors and suppliers.

How Is Environmental Performance Recorded?

Managing and recording your environmental performance is key to being able to make use of the information and communicate details about it. ISO 14001 is the quality standard for environmental performance. To adhere to it you’ll need a strong environmental management system in place.

Fortunately, what used to be a long and drawn out, paper-based, recording process, can now be handled by environmental management software. A lot of this software is online and firms are increasingly using cloud-based apps to manage their environmental performance.

The best things about managing your environmental performance in this way is that they can link effortlessly with other quality standards and provide a centralised and streamlined recording process. You can also access them from multiple locations; ideal for larger or more dynamic teams.

In Summary – Improving Your Business’s Environmental Performance…

We hope we’ve given you some food for thought here. We’ve detailed a summary overview of what an organisation’s environmental performance is, an understanding of how to measure and record it and a vast array of business and social/environmental reasons to manage it effectively.

Of course, being a business owner, you may not have the time to deal with this yourself or might not want the expense of an in-house team doing it for you. That’s where a firm like EDP can help.

Environmental consultancy services can provide a whole host of corporate and compliance services, management systems, training solutions and a variety of other services to help your business improve its environmental performance.