Reports from the Environment Journal highlight one of the biggest trends in business development: sustainability, with 64% of business owners wanting to be more sustainable in their activities.
Eco-friendly and sustainable business practice is a high priority for many reasons. From increasing consumer interest and brand loyalty to inspiring more talent to apply for jobs, environmental advocacy is something many people connect with personally.
All this means environmental certification is becoming more important for businesses.
But why?
What is environmental certification and why is it necessary if you’re already ploughing ahead with impactful changes for the environment? In this blog, our accreditation and sustainability experts discuss the value of environmental certification.
What Is An Environmental Certification Scheme?
An environmental certification scheme is a third-party assessment of your business practices as they relate to environmentalism and sustainability. An assessor, such as CHAS, will design a series of criteria and measure your business against them. By meeting those criteria, you gain the approval and certification of the assessor, which you can then use as a badge of validation for your brand.
Your independent assessment scheme will audit your environmental activities, policies and initiatives to verify that:
- The claims you make about your sustainable practices are valid.
- That you comply with the criteria outlined by the assessment process.
- That your environmental practice standards are meeting the standards required of your industry.
The typical process will include reviewing your environmental policy documents and any supporting documentation that back up your environmental practice. This documentation may consist of other, more specific accreditations or evidence of working with sustainable suppliers or partners.
Environmental certification monitors and helps improve environmental practice. Renewed annually to ensure you are maintaining your eco-friendly activities, it formalises your current environmental work in a visible and verifiable way to third parties.
Who Is Environmental Certification For?
Environmental certification is suitable for contractor businesses of any size. As environmentally-friendly activities become a crucial part of all supply chains, any business that seeks to create strategic partnerships and grow within its industry needs to consider how to validate its environmental schemes and initiatives.
Why Do You Need Environmental Certification?
If we forget about the value environmental certification has for protecting the planet and our global communities and stick strictly to the commercial need for this certification, where is the value?
Environmental process management is often part of a business’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. As clients look to mitigate their projects’ impact on the environment, their attention will inevitably fall upon their supply chain.
Environmentally responsible clients will be looking for contractors working to improve their sustainability process and reduce their environmental impact, which aids their own initiatives. Since eco-conscious decision-making is on the rise, this means more and more clients are on the hunt for contractors that can demonstrate environmentally-friendly credentials.
The core need for environmental certification then comes out of a need for finding work.
Contractors who achieve environmental certification can show clients they are capable of supporting their CSR initiatives. Clients may also have to manage environmental legislation and meet certain regulatory targets to improve branding and consumer perspective. Your clients may have a legal need to work with environmentally certified contractors — from limiting product waste and by-products to empowering local, sustainable projects.
Environmental certification is a tool to show you can help clients by being a supplier capable of supporting both their CSR objectives and legal responsibilities.
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Benefits Of Environmental Certification
We’ve already covered the two key benefits of environmental certification: the ability to comply with a client’s sustainability standards and any legal regulations set out for industry activity.
However, there are more benefits of environmental certification to be enjoyed than compliance and tender eligibility.
Save Time And Money
If your client requires your business to comply with certain environmental standards before you can bid on a contract, they may ask you to prequalify for a tender through a questionnaire process, or they may ask to audit your sustainability activities before accepting you. This can be a drawn-out and expensive process involving a lot of administrative hours. You can demonstrate you’ve already covered the criteria they require through environmental certification, which reduces your administrative load, saving your business time and money.
Identify Weaknesses In Your Environmental Policy
Environmental certifications not only help you show what you’re doing right but can also help you identify key areas of sustainability management where your business is not performing as well as it could. Certifications put your policies under the spotlight and enable in-depth analysis of process and practice. Through such analysis, you can find weaknesses in your sustainability plans and take steps to improve your environmental activities before they impact your business.
Improve Stakeholder Investment In Environmental Activity
Certification can be an important objective in any business strategy, which results in more members of the business — from employees to management — becoming more professionally and personally invested in efforts to achieve certification and pass assessments. The knock-on effect of this increased engagement is more interest and focus on your environmental activities, helping to encourage new ideas and strengthen your environmental position.
Incorporate Environmental Policy Into Business Strategy
Environmental policy has the potential to not only work harmoniously with business strategy but also bolster it. Integrating environmental activities with business strategy helps you deploy more sustainable solutions aligned with your business goals and objectives, leading to long-term forecasting of your environmental performance targets. By acquiring certification for your environmental activity, you can improve the visibility of your environmental practice, which supports better integration with business strategy.
Encourage Further Environmental Change In Your Industry
Environmental certification is a badge worn with pride and one we’ve already established as having a series of important benefits. Your success following environmental certification can prove influential in inspiring other contractors to focus on their sustainability efforts, which benefits the industry and climate-crisis prevention targets as a collective.
Which Is The Best Environmental Certification?
The best environmental certification for your contractor business is the certification that gives you the coverage desired by your industry and your clients. At CHAS, we offer the Common Assessment Standard, a 12 point risk and quality assessment accreditation scheme that includes — amongst other areas — environmental certification.
The benefit of the Common Assessment Standard over other assessment schemes is that your contractor enterprise is not only covered for environmental certification but other accreditations as well.
The Common Assessment Standard includes assessments such as anti-corruption and bribery, and quality assurance, which can show you’re following measures to ensure the quality of your sourcing process and prevent risks that could be unsustainable or illegal. Corporate social responsibility, which covers your own environmental initiatives, and modern slavery practice assessment is also part of the Common Assessment Standard, which helps to show your well-rounded nature as a business with a mission to improve society in all forms.
Given that the primary draw of environmental certification is to demonstrate your value to a client — and your commitment to supporting their CSR initiatives — having a fully comprehensive accreditation scheme like the Common Assessment Standard makes sense.
Follow the CHAS blog to get more insights on managing and reducing your environmental impact. Join CHAS to demonstrate your compliance with environmental standards by completing our environmental and sustainability assessments under PAS91 and the Common Assessment Standard.
Not sure where to start? Learn how the membership process works by reading our guide to joining CHAS. You can also speak with a CHAS advisor to learn more about environmental certification and the perks that come with it.
