Environmental Legislation Over-view

Thank you Business Environment Partnership (www.thebep.org.uk) and Edinburgh Council for today's workshop for smaller businesses on environmental legislation. With good input from SEPA on their advisory and monitoring roles.

Since 1990, enviro requirements on business have been mounting, thanks to European legislation. But exactly how that affects individual businesses can be tricky to work out. There's certainly no shortage of paid-for services to subscribe to, and consultants to lead you through the maze.

I'm very pleased to discover the excellent free resources at http://ping.fm/FwvKv which includes a questionnaire they created (http://ping.fm/iaVafnetregs/links/97472.aspx) where you can get a bespoke answer as to your environmental compliance requirements. It's apparently the same questionnaire that appears on the Business Link site (www.businesslink.gov.uk/), just in case you've been through that particular hoop already.

Once you have your legislation list, that's the foundation for your Environmental Management System (EMS). Then you need to to dig deeper to find out what you need to do about each individual piece of legislation by searching www.netregs.gov.uk. There's a free text box at the top right, but you can also run searches by business type, enviro topic, or go through current & future legislation. Netregs streams info according to location as the Scottish Parliament have their own variants, as do England & Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The Netregs site has been recently re-vamped so it's worth re-visiting if you haven't been there for a while.

You can sign up for their updates so you stay up-to-date.

There's enough info there to help you create your own Environmental Management System (EMS).
I'm told they are going to expand their e-learning tools for specific sectors. These currently cover agriculture plus food and drink.

Another way to get help with planning your EMS is to go in for the VIBES awards, Scotland's top environmental awards for business, which feed into the European environmental awards, with seriously good international publicity exposure and networking opportunities.

The VIBES application form covers the main building blocks you need and the feedback from the judges (free to all award applicants) will give you an expert steer. I used that to move our long-standing environment policy (first written in 1986, based on reduce, re-use and re-cycle) to a more sophisticated level encompassing carbon offsetting for necessary business energy use and travel. We got our expert feedback and followed the judges' advice. We entered again last year, to be rewarded with a place on the shortlist.

Once shortlisted, you receive an intensive visit from the judges, to prove you have demonstrated exceptional environmental performance, and of course, it's a great opportunity to get further bespoke advice. And we got serious new business enquiries at the awards ceremony itself, which was a welcome bonus.

One of the key messages I took away from today's workshop is that it's not enough to assume a waste contractor has the full range of licences they need for both transporting and disposing of different types of waste. You need to check this and be able to stream your waste for the most cost-effective disposal.

You also need to make sure that the paper trail is properly signed off when you hand over the responsibility for your waste to a contractor.

Otherwise, if your stuff is found dumped illegally, you can't prove you were not responsible and you will be held liable. That could mean a fine of several thousands of pounds.

PHPR collect VIBES awards 2009 certificate at Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh

Being good PR people, we spun our VIBES news round our contacts and have ended up seven positive results: several of which are really promising meeting requests.

There is also another agency wanting to know how to get the VIBES, so we've pointed them to the VIBES site where it's easy to download the entry forms and all the practical notes on the different award categories: http://www.vibes.org.uk/enter.htm

Plus Margot Grantham, the Scottish director of the excellent Athena network for women sent me a flyer with useful info regarding free recession-busting workshops in Edinburgh for small businesses run by the Business Environment Partnership alongside the City of Edinburgh Council. We are more than happy to pass this info on. The leaflet says:

As part of their Economic Resilience Action Plan the City of Edinburgh Council are working with the Business Environment Partnership to run a series of free workshops at the City of Edinburgh Council Chambers. Upcoming workshops are designed to give practical ideas to cut utility bill costs and understand current & future environmental legislation that may have a financial impact on your business.

Demystifying environmental legislation. What SME’s need to know to ensure compliance – 26th January 2010

Understand your utility bills to cut costs – 25th February 2010

They point out that a 20% cut in energy costs represents the same bottom line benefit as a 5% increase in sales....

The ‘One-Stop-Shop’ provides free tailored advice to any Edinburgh-based company from a microsized start-up to a larger SME. Advice ranges from Government funded grants & loans, resource efficiency, green marketing opportunities to legislation with the aim of identifying cost saving or new sales opportunities for businesses.

Find out more about the workshops or their free advisory service at http://www.thebep.org.uk/ The lady dealing with registrations is called Amy.

Eco Car

Look out for Nissan's 'Leaf' in 2010 - an all-electric car doing 100 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 90mph.

We're currently up for a Scottish environmental award: VIBES, which may be a first for a Scottish PR agency? We have seen the business sense in "reduce, re-use, recycle" and have run our Edinburgh PR agency on that basis since 1986. Plus we do like to keep abreast of promising eco-tech developments.

Fuel Cells Challenge

Carbon Trust's Polymer Fuel Cells Challenge has £8m to support projects that promise to slash the cost of fuel cells.

We're currently short-listed for a Scottish environmental award, which I think is quite unusual for a PR agency, so we keep an eye on new eco-tech developments. And situated on Edinburgh's sea-front, we are particularly interested in staying cosy!

PHPR short-listed for a VIBES award

Awards are great for business. Many are free to enter and you get to call your business an award-winning enterprise for evermore. Entering is time-consuming, but the best offer expert judges' feedback, so that every entrant benefits.

We have won awards in the past, but I am particularly pleased to hear that PHPR is on the shortlist for the top Scottish environmental awards for business - VIBES. Are we the first Scottish PR agency to be shortlisted?

The VIBES application form process is designed to create a robust environmental policy, so being short-listed is really encouraging as we now know that we are on the right track.

Taking care of our environment is not just a PR exercise for us. We have reduced, re-used and recycled since 1986, so we must have spared a few trees by now. But we were short on measuring and documenting our evidence, as we found out by entering VIBES last year.

Like all the best awards, VIBES (it stands for Vision in Business for the Environment of Scotland) gives expert judge's feedback to every entrant. The idea of entering last year was to use the feedback to do better this year. It has worked.

The main focus is on providing supporting evidence and we addressed some of that in the application. We will be visited at our Edinburgh base and judged in September.

Fingers and toes crossed!