I have to say, I love looking at all the actions that the organisations signed up to JustAct are taking. In fact, I think I'm turning into an Actions Geek. Honestly, I spend my lunch hour tootling round the website finding out how many people are turning off their lights and who's engaging with their staff over climate change. Someone's got to do it though, eh?
When my lunch hour's over one of the things I do is work on our Environmental Management System (EMS). I don't know how many of you have/ are working towards one? Ours is called the Acorn Scheme, and it's based on British Standard 8555 (BS8555); we're working towards completing level three by March 2011.
So far... so good. Things do tend to sound more difficult once you capitalise them (EMS), but really it's been surprisingly easy. The Acorn Progress Matrix (see?) which Groundwork gave us as part of our initial training lays out each step, and there's lots of guidance if you're not sure what a 'continual improvement action' might be (turns out to be JustAct, give or take).
The first stage is all about 'securing commitment and establishing a baseline', and happily we already had quite a bit of this - a draft environmental policy, senior management commitment, and the aforementioned 'improvement actions.' For example, we've got good recycling, but we're realised that in one office we can get water filter jugs and stick them in the fridge rather than run a water cooler. Even the 'Environmental Performance Indicators' haven't been too hard because we've realised that we already collect lots of the information we want - how much electricity, gas and water we use etc. We do need to know the proportion of our waste that's recycled, but all we have to do is ask the cleaners to note down the number of recycling and non-recycling bags that go out each day. Bisto.
Stage two isn't much fun to be truthful, it's the legal requirements and our compliance with them. Still, because we're a law-abiding, office-based organisation it's still pretty straightforward, we just need to check that we're doing what we should, and that we have a process to monitor that compliance.
We haven't quite got to stage three yet, but I'll let you know when we do...
We're really lucky that our senior management are so supportive, and that we don't really have many impacts. One thing that I know some people face is the pressure to use offsetting. Now I don't think offsetting is the solution, but if you know people who do, try showing them Cheat Neutral. If they're still keen, send them to Sandbag.
If you have any questions about EMSs, do drop me a line...
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