Reduce your carbon impact - good for the environment - good for business.
Are you watching any of the debates about who will be the next President of the USA and were you interested in the recent UK election which saw Labour return to power?
If you followed the two campaigns, you can’t fail to have noticed that the environment
. green issues
ranks as one of the major topics for debate.
And whether you like it or not, environmental responsibility is going to affect you and your business.
So why not embrace it?
First and foremost, it’s the right thing to do in any case, but it will also be of potentially huge benefit for the simple reason that it reflects on how other people and other businesses will view you.
Put it this way, if you pay no regard to environmental responsibility, you are at risk of many firms, organisations and future employees disregarding your business
they only want to deal with people and companies who show a willingness to protect the environment.
This particularly applies if you want to tender for government contracts or those firms and organisations who work within the public sector.
So, what should you do? How do you go about being environmentally responsible? Where do you start?
The best solution is to speak to Jo Holmes and her team at Genee. They’ll lead you by the hand and get you on the right path
and this applies to you whether you are a sole operator or a multinational conglomerate. Genee has also started working with a number of start-ups in Durham.
“We fully understand that a lot of businesses have other business priorities and pressures” says Genee MD Jo Holmes, “but once we explain that making some simple alterations to how they operate their business can be hugely beneficial, not only to the environment but also to their bottom line and how their business is perceived, they quickly become interested and start to appreciate the potential benefits. It’s not difficult
it just requires a desire to do what’s right.”
Genee are the region’s delivery partners for Investors in the Environment (iiE) which is a nationally recognised accreditation scheme designed to help organisations reduce their environmental impact and, yes, save money. There are three accreditation levels…bronze, silver and green. They reflect how far along your environmental journey you are and how embedded sustainability is across your organisation. Genee will take you through these various levels to get you accredited and help you identify, measure and reduce your environmental impacts and promote your progress to open doors to new contacts and new business. It’s a win-win for everyone including our environment.
“The first thing we do is get to know the organisation, how its structured and how far along the environmental journey they are on,” adds Jo. “we then help them develop policies and systems to look holistically at the organisation and identify measures to reduce energy use, travel expense and waste management
three areas which are probably high on their list of expenditure and therefore ideal to target for savings. It’s a lovely framework that organisations of all sizes can work to and when accredited promote internally to staff and externally.”
“We have training courses, training videos and many resources and templates that can be used by our members to build processes and procedures and increase staff and stakeholder engagement. We want organisations to build environmental management systems that work for them, so we ensure we are not overly prescriptive. Our overall aim is to reduce environmental impact, which in turn saves money, we help organisations become leaner. It also helps firms retain and get good staff, especially young people because they want to work for firms which look after the environment. They view it as being the right thing to do. A key element of the accreditation is gathering data and producing a carbon footprint, this helps identify and measure the impact of savings made but also report carbon data externally, a growing ask, particularly among the public sector supply chain.
“In other words, we lead organisations by the hand to achieve Investors in the Environment accreditation. They don’t start off with a blank sheet of paper.”
And Genee is passionate about practicing what they preach. They have iiE accreditation themselves, which was a key element of them becoming a Certified BCorp in July 2024, a huge achievement given their size and capacity. BCorp is a global community of businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental impact.
And of course, when it comes to Investors in the Environment accreditation, they are the go-to people to help your organisation
and they can continue to act as your environmental consultants to help you attain further accreditation such as B-Corp recognition.
Interested?
Log onto www.genee.org.uk for more information. They have some really useful tips and examples of how working for the environment, will work for you.
You can also contact them directly by calling 07815 754931 or email jo@genee.org.uk