How to write an environmental policy

An environmental policy should form the foundation of environmental improvements made for your business. The environmental policy can provide significant benefits to your business.

Advantages of an environmental policy

Some of the business benefits of an environmental policy include:

• helping you to stay within the law
• keeping employees informed about their environmental roles and responsibilities
• improving cost control
• reducing incidents that result in liability
• conserving raw materials and energy
• improving your monitoring of environmental impacts
• improving the efficiency of your processes

The benefits are not restricted to internal operations. By demonstrating commitment to environmental management, you can develop positive relations with external stakeholders, such as investors, insurers, customers, suppliers, regulators and the local community. This in turn can lead to an improved corporate image and financial benefits, such as increased investment, customer sales and market share.

Put your environmental policy into practice

It's important to bear in mind that these benefits are unlikely to be achieved simply by having an environmental policy in place.

You should make sure that you integrate your environmental policy into your business and put its content into practice. For example, you could set up an environmental management system (EMS) or a less formal programme of environmental improvements.

You can download an example environmental policy (DOCX, 15K).

Get a free sustainability report

All Northern Ireland businesses with an annual energy and resource spend of more than £30k can get a free assessment of their environmental performance across areas such as raw materials, energy, carbon, packaging, biodiversity and waste - find out more about Invest NI Sustainability Reports.