Demand for sustainable or environmentally friendly products and services is quite rightly seeing a continuing upward trend among consumers and businesses, with 43% of consumers actively choosing brands due to their environmental performance. This demand has encouraged some businesses to make misleading claims about the impacts associated with their products.

With increasing public attention on issues such as packaging waste, carbon emissions and ecosystem impacts of products, even the most conscientious customer can find themselves baffled by the array of claims being made. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently announced that they would be focussing on protecting consumers against so-called “green-wash” to ensure that companies genuinely investing in going green would be recognised.

Adopting an Environmental Management System (EMS) approach in your business, is a great way of ensuring that the impacts from your product or service are understood, defined as a performance metric and demonstrably measured and managed down. Your EMS will help you actively manage risks and opportunities from impacts across the product or service lifecycle, with clear targets, objectives and verifiable performance evaluation, to drive real benefits within your organisation and evidence “continual improvement”.

This transparent, evidence based approach to reducing impacts can help engage and generate buy-in from internal stakeholders to drive improvements forward, and also supports external communication with customers and suppliers to show them you mean business!