All audits can be delivered on a bespoke basis, however a typical Sustain audit will:
- Quantify your environmental impacts.
- Quantify staff behaviour including travel behaviour if
desired.
- Assess relative significance of your impacts.
- Compare your organisation's environmental performance against
robust benchmarks.
- Assess legal compliance.
- Make recommendations for improving performance, which give detail of expected savings.
Sustain will conduct the audit to international and accepted industry standards so that you can have confidence in the work and use the findings in your reporting. Sustain also provides added value to its audits by:
- Reporting our methods so that your organisation can institute
appropriate monitoring procedures and, if desired, conduct your own
audits in the future.
- Conducting the audit so that it can provide the baseline environmental review required by Environmental Management Systems meeting the EMAS and ISO 14001 standards.
- Provide additional management tools such as a register of legal
compliance and a register of environmental aspects and associated
impacts.
- Provide additional guidance as necessary such as on procurement strategy and carbon offsetting.
As Sustain is an accredited carbon trust consultant, we can address the energy aspect of the audit with funding from the Carbon Trust - so long as your organisation meets the CT funding criteria.
As fuel prices increase and environmental issues become ever more pressing organisations from all sectors are increasingly recognizing the value of making energy and resource efficiency a primary concern. It is also important to understand, anticipate and comply with environmental regulation.
As well as reducing environmental impacts and exposure to risk there are clear financial benefits from an audit - most organisations could cut their fuel bills by up to 20% at little or no cost through applying affordable and effective measures to avoid wasting energy or creating unnecessary carbon emissions. Better waste and water management can also generate very significant savings, often with little or no cost. The key to unlocking these savings and improving your organisation's environmental performance is in conducting a systematic appraisal of your energy, waste, water, travel and supply chain - an energy and environmental audit.
