The standard is designed for any type of organisation – inclusive of all activities and sectors. In fact, there are over 300,000 organisations with ISO14001 certifications, spanning over 170 countries globally. But you don’t have to become certified for ISO14001 to use the tools within it – if you wish, you can use the standard to guide your business’ environmental strategy without going through the certification process.

With that being said, getting certified from a third-party certification body is a great way to demonstrate your commitment to sustainability, and communicating your environmental values to your customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. Further to this, for some businesses, becoming certified (and the steps it takes to get certified) helps them demonstrate how they meet regulatory requirements, proving useful for their compliance submissions.

As discussed above, there are lots of reasons why obtaining ISO14001 certification, or more broadly, taking a strategic approach to improving environmental performance, can help your business. These include:

• Showing compliance with regulatory requirements
• Increasing leadership involvement with environmental performance
• Increasing employee awareness of environmental issues and responsibilities – facilitating a culture change
• Improving environmental performance
• Increasing stakeholder confidence in environmental strategy
• Improving company reputation and standing out against competitors
• Providing financial advantages through improving the efficiency of processes and reducing costs (i.e. energy savings)
• Encouraging greater environmental performance of suppliers by integrating them into the business systems.