Environment

Good environmental management can reduce your risks, save you money, engage your customers and colleagues, and help you win business.

Hosking Associates helps makes your organisation a more environmentally friendly place to work and visit.

Good environmental management starts with demonstrating your compliance with regulatory and stakeholder needs and expectations. We have proven experience of working across sectors to check, assure and test you are doing the right things, right.

How far you go, after compliance, is up to you. Saving money, reducing waste, managing risks and promoting a positive image are some strong drivers to do more. Feeling confident about answering questions from customers, suppliers; showing the actions you are taking to manage your most significant challenges, can give you the edge.

We will work with you to translate your significant environmental and sustainability challenges into business risks and opportunities. Together we can focus on action to support your brand, differentiate you from competitors and make you more efficient.

Our goal is to make the environment relevant to you and involve everyone in your organisation. They will know why they are doing things a given way and how that contributes to the benefit of the business.
We know it can be challenge to know how to move forward so we have outlined a few approaches below to give you some ideas. We will build a program to meet your needs.

 

We will take you on a structured journey starting with achieving compliance. From there you choose. We can focus on key challenges or subject areas, like energy or waste management right through to full management systems. We can guide you through to third party certification and awards such as Green Ribbon, ISO14001, ISO 9001, business benchmarks and sector specific recognition which provide credibility and allow you to demonstrate your sustainability credentials to others.

Our proven approach is to work as your partner to embed the right actions and behaviours in your business. We like to work as a member of your team, whether you are a business, school or trust. Our capabilities will complement your expertise and our style is to support and coach colleagues to gain experience and competence in specialist areas.

This pragmatic and practical way of working is highly cost effective. We provide skills, knowledge and resources where and when you need them. As you become more capable we can flex our service to continually meet your evolving need.

Please see ‘Where to Start’ for more information.

Our starting point is always to find out where you are and where you want to go.  To help you work out which approach works best for you here are some suggestions.

1 – Our Green Ribbon audit

  • High-level review of 50 environmental management, performance and compliance issues
  • Snap-shot audit of environmental performance.
  • Headline scored report
  • Recommendations to improve
  • Can be repeated annually to help you track improvements

2 – In depth review – starting point for improvement

  • Identification, evaluation and relevance assessment of key environmental issues
  • Management and performance of environmental business objectives
  • Comparison with best practice
  • Prioritised action plan of recommendations

3 – Management systems – implementation, transition and development

  • Building on an initial review right through to external certification for ISO 14001
  • Tailored support matched to your resources, time and knowledge
  • Facilitated internal audit and management review
  • Integration, transition and updating

4 – Reporting, data analysis and tender submissions

  • Independent assessment of data for accuracy and completeness
  • Data source auditing and appropriateness assessment for relevant KPI reporting
  • Performance evaluation
  • Support for third party reporting, award and tender applications

5 – Stakeholder identification, evaluation and management

  • Identify, weight and prioritise stakeholders who can affect or be effected by your organisation
  • Determine and define needs and expectations
  • Align internal and external stakeholder expectations
  • Develop and integrate engagement and communication strategies

6 – Environmental compliance assessment

  • Focused assessment on regulatory and legal requirements
  • Assessment of compliance and recording of evidence
  • Identification and quantification of risks
  • Recommendations for improvement

7 – Training and development

  • Awareness raising of environmental issues and their relevance to your business
  • Quantifying and evaluating your environmental impacts
  • Carbon accounting and GHG measurement and reporting
  • Management systems

8 – Strategy development and policy review

  • Senior management workshops to explore your readiness for future environmental challenges
  • Risk and opportunity review
  • Integrated policies and goal alignment

9 – Translating sustainability

  • What does all the jargon mean?
  • What does it mean to your organisation?
  • How to work out what is important – and do it

Climate change, resource scarcity, stakeholder management, social value – the list of sustainable business risks and trends facing business grows by the year.

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, however, working out what is important and relevant to your business now is less daunting.

No business works in isolation.  We all have suppliers, colleagues and customers.  Finding out what is important to you and them, and managing the important stuff will make a difference.

The matrix below lists a broad range of issues under different headings.  You can look down the lists and find out which are most important to you.  We can help you align your policies and programmes so that you can show your consistency in approach to others.

This list is a useful starting point and can help start a conversation, identify priorities or test stakeholder views.

Sustainability matrix – pick and mix – what’s important to you?

Arrangements we will work alongside you to manage include:

  • Air Pollution
  • Asbestos Risk Management
  • Aspects and Impacts Registers
  • Audits and checks at each level to verify that arrangements are in place
  • Biodiversity
  • Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) where we will look at use of chemicals and pesticides and storage of fuel or oil
  • Contaminated Land
  • Dust
  • Energy Monitoring or Reduction
  • Enforcement Officer Action
  • Emergency Planning
  • Incident Reporting, complaint handling and Trend Analysis
  • Invasive Species Control
  • Light Pollution
  • Legionella Control
  • Noise Nuisance
  • Odour
  • Ozone Depleting Substances / Fluorinated Gases Compliance
  • Pests and pest control
  • Policy Documentation
  • Procurement & Purchasing including Environmental Arrangements for managing contractors
  • Spillage Controls including arrangements in respect of fuel use, delivery and storage
  • Training
  • Waste Management – Solid & Liquid
  • Water Management
  • Water Pollution – Managing risks of