Every successful business has to make a profit, manage risk, control costs and prepare for the challenges ahead. At the same time, business is becoming more complex and competitive. Perhaps the biggest challenges that business faces today are:
- Maintaining compliance with environmental regulations and other requirements
- Providing products and services that have minimum environmental impact throughout their product life cycle.
- Demonstrating corporate social responsibility to its stakeholders.
And this challenge stretches up the organisation’s supply chain to the raw materials it uses and down to the product ‘end of life’ - the landfill or recycling facility.We are specialist consultants and auditors who assist clients in the following areas:
- Environmental Management.
- Social Responsibility and Ethical Trading
- Sustainable Growth.
We can help you with the challenges ahead from product design, through procurement and manufacturing to product end-of-life.
Environmental Management
We have a long and established track record in assisting organisations in environmental management. Our services help you to:
- Maintain compliance with environmental regulations and other requirements (such as corporate of customer requirements).
- Minimise environmental risk and improve performance.
- Reduce waste and resource consumption.
- Establish and maintain environmental management systems and achieve certification to ISO 14001 or registration to EMAS.
- Assess organisation and product life cycle environmental aspects and impacts.
- ‘Design for the Environment’
- Demonstrate ‘Producer Responsibility’ such as compliance with WEEE and RoHS issues
- ‘Green Procurement’ - Manage your contractors and supply chain
- Establish an effective internal and second party audit function.
We provide audit, training and consultancy services to support you in the implementation of systems that address the current and future environmental issues.
To date we have provided audit, training and consultancy services to several hundred organisations across the world ranging from oil and gas multi-nationals to small local companies.
A heavily polluted river in China. When you outsourced to the Far East, did you consider the environmental impact? Would you want this river and your product featured on TV together?
Ethical Trading
A beautiful product, but what about the working conditions, pay and health and safety. Would your customer buy the product if they knew the full story?
The potential damage to the reputation of a company that is ‘found out’ on an ethical trading issue is huge. For examples organisations that have been found to have sourced from factories that use child labour or that severely pollute stay in the mind of the public for many years after the event. Also, factories that exploit and endanger their workforce and pollute the environment rarely supply a quality product consistently.
We have worked for many years with a major retailer and other clients on social responsibility and ethical issues. We assist our clients to develop supply chains that meet their requirements in terms of environment, health and safety, conditions of employment and exploitation.
Our services help you to:
- Develop ethical trading policies, standards and codes of practice
- Assess and monitor supply chains against you ethical trading requirements
- Establish and maintain ethical trading procurement procedures
- Achieve a continual improvement process in the supply chain.
Corporate Social Responsibility & Sustainable Growth
Sustainable growth is about meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the future. It is a complex web of social, economic and environmental issues which ultimately determines the fate of mankind and the planet. While governments wrestle with these issues, many organisations have recognised that a sustainable growth is fundamental to a successful future and have established a corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework.
We don’t have all the answers to this overwhelming challenge! However, we recognise that CSR includes:
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Providing products and services that do not harm or exploit people or the environment at any point in the product life cycle and that are sustainable
Providing social and economic benefit to all those involved in the product life cycle.
A man hauling dung vies for road space in modern India. Is it a sustainable product or sustainable transport and does it meet the social and economic needs of the modern world?
