Cumbria Business Environment Network

Award Criteria - So, what's involved?

The criteria for achieving each level is:

Bronze Award - demonstrating your initial awareness, and developing your environmental policy, requirements are:
 

  • you have a written environmental policy statement that is clearly relevant to your business (we will help you with this)
  • you have completed (with support) an initial review helping you identify your business's impacts and areas of strength and weakness
  • you have a basic awareness of your legal and general environmental issues
  • you can demonstrate evidence of a basic commitment to environmental management within your business eg. recycling initiatives, lighting etc....

Silver Award - assessing environmental impact, and developing targets and objectives for improved performance, appropriate and proportionate to your business and its activities, requirements are:

  • you have an environmental policy that is communicated internally and externally
  • you have reviewed your business Aspects and Impacts
  • you are aware of your legal requirements, have a way to track compliance and are aware of forthcoming issues.
  • you have procedures for an emergency incident - planning and response.
  • you have ways of identifying environmental training needs, and that in general you have a good level of staff awareness

Gold Award - demonstrating environmental excellence through the development of a full EMS appropriate to the size and nature of your business, requirements are:

That the business has satisfied all the requirements for the Silver award:
  • you have set targets and objectives that are relevant to your businesses aspects and impacts.
  • you have tasks in place to achieve these targets (Environmental Management Programmes).
  • you have appropriate communication within your business and clear ownership of your developing Environmental Management System
plus:
  • that within your business you have ways of identifying environmental training needs, and that in general you have a good level of staff awareness.
  • you demonstrate that you have procedures for monitoring and measuring your performance appropriate to your objectives and targets.
  • you have a procedure in place for carrying out internal environmental audits relating to key business issues
  • you have a system in place for identifying and dealing with non conformances
  • you demonstrate that you have procedures for the control of documentation and relevant documents.
  • you understand the importance of management review and be able to produce a summary of the review outputs 

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Current News

Since 2006 CBEN have identified the following savings in Cumbrian businesses that we have worked with:
£13,443,987 of cost savings
44,774 tonnes of CO2 savings 
58,542 tonnes of waste diverted from landfill
106,595 tonnes of materials saved 
689,666 m³ of water saved 

Keep up to date with current environmental issues and regulations using these links:

Green Intelligence - NW Business Environment News

NetRegs  Environmental Regulations

CBEN Awards  Press Release