The NEBOSH Green Team, who successfully led the work to reach the standards of environmental management required to secure the accreditation, identified and implemented a number of simple behaviour changes that have delivered substantial improvements. As a result, over the past two years NEBOSH has reduced gas usage at its head office by 13%, significantly cut the amount of water used and now recycles 78% of its waste.

Business practices are also carried out more sustainably, so double-sided printing has become standard, reducing paper use by 18%, and staff are encouraged to take laptops into meetings enabling documents to be reviewed electronically to avoid printing large numbers of copies.

With continuous improvement a key part of the ISO14001:2015 accreditation, the team set quarterly KPIs for NEBOSH's employees to work towards. During 2017, these will focus on changing the organisation's attitude towards travel by aiming to reduce the number of miles driven and flown by the team. For example, when NEBOSH launched a new qualification recently, a webinar was held to inform its course providers rather than members of the team driving around the country to hold face-to-face meetings.

NEBOSH Chief Executive, Teresa Budworth, commented: "As an environmentally-conscious organisation, we wanted to make an unequivocal statement about our commitment to the environment and feel that ISO14001:2015 does just that. It underlines the standards of environmental protection that we adhere to and enables us to manage and reduce our environmental impacts.

"Working towards the accreditation was a real team effort and I'm very proud of our collective achievement. We will now focus on maintaining the high standard of environmental management that we have achieved and will continue to look for ways to reduce our impact."

ISO14001: 2015 requires organisations to consider all environmental issues relevant to their operations such as air pollution, water and sewage issues, waste management, soil contamination, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and resource use and efficiency. It also demonstrates compliance with current and future statutory and regulatory requirements.

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