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Environmental reports can have a lot of advantages for your business. Your business may be legally required to provide environmental reports, or environmental information with your products. Even if you do not have to produce a report, there could be significant benefits.

Environmental reports benefits for marketing and stakeholder relations

Customers are increasingly interested in the environmental and social impact of businesses. Producing an environmental report can bring a marketing advantage by demonstrating your business' awareness of its environmental responsibilities. It may also help improve your relationship with key stakeholders, such as investors, suppliers and the wider local community.

Environmental reports benefits for recruitment and retention

Potential job applicants increasingly look at the environmental performance of a business they're thinking about working for.

In addition, you may find it easier to retain your existing staff if you produce a report that clearly demonstrates your environmental performance.

Cost savings from environmental reporting

Environmental reporting should focus your business' attention on environmental performance. Typically, this will result in improved performance, which should lead to cost savings.

Environmental reports benefits for legal compliance

Large and medium companies must produce an annual business review, which must incorporate a fair review of the company's business, and a description of the principal risks and uncertainties facing the company.

This annual review is expected to include some mention of environmental matters, including the company's impact on the environment. For quoted companies, and those that carry on insurance market activity, this is a legal requirement.

Large companies must use environmental key performance indicators to report on environmental matters - where these are necessary to understand the development, performance or position of the company.

UK pension fund trustees must disclose how they have considered social, economic and environmental matters. Companies that disclose this information, for example in environmental reports, are in a better position to be considered in investment decisions by trustees.

Small companies are exempt from the above requirements as long as they meet two of the following criteria:

• turnover not more than 拢5.6 million
• balance sheet total not more than 拢2.8 million
• not more than 50 employees

Stand-alone environmental reporting, as a one-off exercise isolated from your other activities, is unlikely to be successful. Environmental reporting will work best based on information from your environmental management system. This provides a mechanism for you to make improvements based on the figures produced in your report, and shows your involvement and commitment to collect the data.

The environmental reporting process

To produce an environmental report you should:

1. identify the audience for your report
2. talk to the audience to understand their concerns and questions
3. identify the internal data you'll need to calculate facts and figures for the report
4. collect the data
5. decide how you're going to publish the report
6. produce and publish the report
7. obtain feedback and review the impact of the report
8. make improvements

Scope of environmental reporting

If you have more than one site, division, department or business unit, you could produce one business-wide report or individual reports. The advantage of individual reports is that they are more easily understood and relate more directly to individual managers and - in the case of site-based reports - to local communities. Individual reports can then be consolidated into business-wide figures for a broader audience.

Getting outside help on environmental reporting

Think about whether outside help could be useful, especially if environmental reporting is new to you. Consultants can help you to achieve a balanced approach, produce a report that will be easily understood and advise you on the sort of material that should go into it.

The use of independent third-party assurance statements, such as audit-based verification of your environmental data, adds credibility to your environmental reporting by giving stakeholders confidence that your approach is robust and reliable.

For your environmental report to be credible and useful, it must follow certain principles.

Transparency through environmental reporting

It must be absolutely clear what data is being reported, and how and why it is collected. For example:

• Does the figure for carbon emissions also include those attributable to energy use, travel, waste disposal and supply chains?
• Where is the data collected from?
• How, and how often, is it collected?
• Exactly what parts of your business does it apply to?
• Does it include suppliers, contractors, freelancers, franchisees and sub-contractors?
• On what basis do you convert, for example, electricity consumption to tonnes of carbon?

Accountability through environmental reporting

You should also think about who you're accountable to in terms of the environmental report. You may want to consider:

• the extent of stakeholder engagement
• feedback from stakeholders
• tailoring your report to the needs of your stakeholders
• incorporating a third party assurance statement

Credibility through environmental reporting

An environmental report is most valuable when it is an integral part of an environmental management system. This demonstrates to stakeholders that the environmental report is not just for show, but clearly acknowledges and addresses society's growing awareness and concern for sustainable development.

Environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantitative measures - actual numbers - that put values on the environmental performance of your business.

Examples of environmental KPIs

You can produce environmental KPIs using facts and figures which your business already collects, such as:

• energy bills
• water bills
• purchasing records
• vehicle fuel use or vehicle mileage figures
• waste management bills
• travel receipts

An environmental KPI should be accompanied by:

• information on why it was included (its purpose and impact)
• how the information was obtained and calculated
• if any assumptions were made

How to choose your environmental KPIs

You should report on KPIs that you are both directly and indirectly responsible for. For example, you should report the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from your electricity use, as well as the amount actually emitted directly from your own premises. You could even report on your supply chain's KPIs.

The government has produced a list of environmental KPIs that are relevant to businesses. The four main environmental KPI areas are:

• emissions to air
• emissions to water
• emissions to land
• resource use

You can .

You may want to think about other ways that your business impacts on the environment, such as:

• light
• heat
• noise
• smell
• vibration
• electromagnetic radiation
• visual impact

Make your environmental KPIs comparable

You should report environmental data in a comparable format, so that your performance can be assessed over time and against other businesses.

KPIs should also be expressed in terms that cover the entire business for the period of the report, which is usually annually. This makes it easier to make meaningful comparisons with other businesses and against previous years.

You should also use measurements that are standard across your business sector. For example, an office-based business might report on tonnes of carbon emitted per million pounds of turnover, whereas a manufacturing business might report on per product or per tonne of product.

Get a free sustainability report

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

You should consider whether to report the impacts of your suppliers because your choice of supplier affects the environmental impact of your business. For example, the environmental impact of a clothing factory in Asia will be different to a factory in Europe due to its location, production processes, etc.

There isn't a standardised technique for reporting the effect of a supply chain in terms of a key performance indicator (KPI). However, you can assess the environmental impact of your supply chain in the following ways:

• Examine your sales ledger to ensure you understand how much you spend with your different suppliers, and what industry sector they are in - eg manufacturing, financial services, courier services, etc.
• Find out the typical environmental impacts and risks of different industry sectors. You can .
• Assess where to focus your efforts, based on both how much you spend with a supplier and the impact they have on the environment. For example, for some businesses it may make more sense to focus on their electricity supplier rather than their office materials supplier.
• Engage with your suppliers as part of your stakeholder engagement process. If you don't already, encourage your suppliers to report their environmental impact using the KPIs that are appropriate for their business sector. Consider encouraging suppliers to improve their environmental performance.
• Use the environmental reporting information from your suppliers as a source of data for your own environmental reports, and as a valuable input to your environmental management system and processes.

Environmental reports are a great way of showing your business' commitment to improving its environmental performance. Another way of demonstrating your 'green' credentials to key customers and stakeholders is to use environmental product declarations (EPDs). EPDs provide information about the environmental aspects of particular goods or services.

For some businesses, such as white goods manufacturers, EPDs are mandatory. For others, such as vehicle manufacturers, there are voluntary industry-wide schemes.

Some public procurement specifications include criteria for the environmental performance of products that are similar to those used in standard labelling schemes. All government procurement has minimum environmental standards for certain types of product.

When making voluntary EPDs, you can choose between self-declared EPDs and standardised labelling schemes.

Self-declared environmental product declarations

Self-declared EPDs are claims that you make yourself. Any self-declared EPD should be truthful, accurate and able to be substantiated. A claim should be relevant, clear as to what it refers to and in plain language. For example, 'this brochure was made with 50 per cent recycled paper'.

When making your own declarations, consider the environmental impact of your product in the following four phases:

• Manufacturing - what raw materials, other resources and energy are used, and what emissions are generated?
• Distribution - is a significant amount of energy used getting the product to market?
• Use - does the product consume energy and water when operated, or does it generate emissions?
• End-of-life - can the product be reused, recovered or recycled? If it goes to landfill, what is its environmental impact?

To make your environmental claims more credible, you could follow the guidance in the international standard ISO 14021. You can .

Standardised labelling schemes

There are many standardised labelling schemes administered by public and private sector bodies, and by non-governmental organisations. These include:

• single-issue labels which relate to a particular environmental issue or category, such as water use or forestry conservancy, and are awarded if a product meets a certain minimum standard
• multiple-issue labels which look at the overall impacts of a product across its whole life-cycle and are awarded when products meet the required standards
• eco-rating schemes which apply a rating code such as a scale of A to G based on one or more aspects of the product's environmental performance, such as electricity use
• eco-profiling schemes which provide factual information in a standardised format, such as the rating information on emissions and fuel consumption provided with vehicles in the United Kingdom
• social or ethical rating schemes in which a number of social or ethical standards are met in order to satisfy an external assessment, such as fair trade labels