How ISO 14001 changed our business' carbon emissions

With every passing year, it is becoming increasingly important to lower our environmental impact.

At consultancy CMS Group, this is something we are taking continuous action on: we recently achieved ISO 14001 certification, and aim to become carbon-neutral by 2030.

By becoming certified, we have made a commitment to keep improving the way we monitor our environmental performance, comply with environmental legislation, and ultimately reduce our carbon emissions.

Our recently developed environmental management system (EMS) helps ensure we fulfil this commitment. An EMS comprises the policies, procedures, plans and records that govern the way a company interacts with the environment; every business is unique, so our EMS has to be tailored to our particular circumstances.

This is where ISO 14001 comes in, with its requirements providing a useful structure for ensuring an EMS includes all key elements.

As the internationally recognised standard for EMSs, it provides a framework for organisations to design, implement and improve their environmental performance.

This, combined with a moral drive to take positive action, made us keen to do something ourselves.

We already had a well-established ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS) in place, which meant we were familiar with the structure of the standards. We had also previously engaged with National Quality Assurance (NQA), a global certification body that accredits UK organisations to ISO standards.

It was therefore clear that implementing ISO 14001 would be an excellent way for us to ensure we were proactively reducing our carbon footprint, complying with relevant legislation, and progressing towards our environmental objectives.

In fact, we decided it made business sense for us to integrate our compliance with the two standards into one unified, comprehensive system.

To better understand the process, we researched the documentation required for ISO 14001, how the standard should be implemented, and the audits involved in gaining certification.

We also spoke to the team at NQA, who helpfully answered questions such as how long the process would take, and how we could bring our ISO 14001 certification in line with that for ISO 9001 to enable easier management in future.

We began by reading the ISO 14001 standard itself, a detailed 35-page-long document that sets out the requirements for an EMS.

This helped us to establish new procedures we needed to develop and identify which parts of our existing QMS needed amending to comply with the standard.

Consolidating these new elements with our QMS, we created an integrated management system (IMS) that covered the requirements of both ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

We invested time in developing documentation specific to ISO 14001, including a legal register, an aspects and impacts register, and a list of risks and opportunities, as well as improving our existing environmental policy.

These are designed to be living documents, to be reviewed on a regular basis by our management and updated, for instance, when ISO standards are revised, new legislation comes into effect or business circumstances change.

We also undertook an environmental analysis across the organisation, identifying areas for improvement and actions we could take.

This prompted a number of changes, starting by segregating the waste we produce, going paperless as far as possible, and purchasing items from our local refill shop rather than buying plastic-packaged alternatives.

• air conditioning refrigerant top-ups
• electricity used in our office
• business travel
• mass of waste produced
• water usage
• commuting and homeworking

We then calculated our carbon footprint using government conversion factors. This gave us a data baseline against which we could track our environmental performance.

It also enabled us to set specific, measurable environmental objectives and to plan how we would achieve them.

As part of our EMS, we have set targets to reduce the quantity of waste generated by 50% and cut carbon emissions from business-related travel by 50% by 2030.

Our overarching goal is to become a carbon-neutral organisation by the end of the decade.

We plan to achieve this by reducing our emissions as far as possible, before considering ethical offsetting to tackle any residual emissions that we cannot eliminate.

Once our EMS had been developed, we circulated it to all staff for review. To support its implementation, we also ran a staff training session to increase awareness and understanding of what ISO 14001 is, why we chose to become certified, and what procedural changes this has prompted for the business.

We also introduced our newly defined environmental objectives and how we plan to achieve them, increasing engagement by inviting questions, ideas and discussion.

During these three months, we carried out monthly internal audits, conducted a management review meeting and identified areas for corrective action.

Then came the certification process, for which we engaged NQA to audit and approve our EMS as meeting the standard's requirements. This process involved two separate full-day audits, for stage one and stage two respectively.

The stage one audit itself, which took place remotely, was a primary documentation review that showed us which requirements of the standard we had successfully met, and which needed improvement to enable certification.

This was a valuable opportunity to receive constructive feedback from an auditor and clarify what we needed to do to become certified. We were then able to refine these areas in preparation for our stage two audit, which would take place in person.

Although most recommendations were minor changes, others required more time to implement. One thing we had missed, for example, was updating our internal audit plan to cover ISO 14001 as well as our existing ISO 9001 system.

We were also advised to revise our management review agenda to cover ISO 14001 as well. Stage one was fundamental in identifying areas for improvement such as these.

The timescale for certification is up to each organisation to decide; we chose to book our stage two audit a month later, as this allowed sufficient time for us to make the advised corrections.

This interim month also coincided with the end of our financial year, allowing us to collate emissions data for 2022/23 and compare this to our baseline year.

We compiled our findings into a sustainability report, a document we intend to publish annually to demonstrate our progress towards our environmental objectives.

During our stage-two audit our EMS was reviewed again, and ISO 14001 certification awarded.

Their feedback helped significantly improve our system for calculating our carbon footprint.

Table 1 consolidates the information we have gathered so far and compares our first two years of emissions data, breaking this down according to the three different scopes of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

As Table 1 shows, our electricity usage increased slightly after the baseline year; this prompted internal discussions on measures we can implement to reduce consumption, such as switching to LED lighting and prioritising use of storage heaters over inefficient fan heaters.

Meanwhile, although our overall emissions from waste increased, a detailed look at the data clarifies the reason for this. In 2021/22, our general waste resulted in 10,000.7kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e), but this included no shredding.

In 2022/23, our general waste decreased to 8,235.7kg CO₂e, but a 224kg load of shredding generated a further 4,766.9kg CO₂e.

The latter was a result of our transition to paperless record-keeping as we digitised documentation and disposed of the hard copy and can thus be seen as an inevitable side-effect of a process that is on the whole positive.

In terms of business travel, distances covered remained consistent, but our emissions decreased significantly.

The reason for this lies in our decision to lease two electrical vehicles (EVs) towards the end of 2021/22; previously all travel emissions were from petrol cars, whereas in 2022/23 EVs accounted for a higher proportion of our business travel and cut our total emissions.

Water has been excluded from our first two years' data because we did not have a meter at the time, but having recently installed one we will incorporate this data into subsequent calculations.

Emissions from upstream transport and distribution will also be included as we begin to collect this data.

By assuring customers that we are committed to managing and lowering our environmental impact, we aim to build credibility and foster a positive public image. This in turn can open up greater business opportunities.

Equally notable are the potential cost savings that implementing an EMS can offer by conserving energy and natural resources, as well as engaging teams in environmental matters and fostering a culture of continuous improvement in an organisation.

The data we gather will also be used to make informed decisions on areas of our organisation that can be improved.

Having successfully achieved ISO 14001 certification, we are proud of the progress we have made and are looking ahead with optimism and commitment to becoming carbon-neutral by 2030.

We hope our positive experience encourages other businesses exploring similar avenues.