Business West Environmental Policy Statement

Business West delivers high quality support and leadership to businesses across Gloucestershire, the West of England and Wiltshire.

We recognise that we can have significant effect on the environment through the delivery of business support and our own activities. We are committed to monitoring and managing these impacts to continually improve our environmental performance and to prevent pollution.

The key environmental impacts of Business West include travel impacts, influence over business use of resources, and the purchase and consumption of materials.

In particular, we will:

• Comply with all relevant environmental legal and other requirements
• Maintain an Environmental Management System in line with the requirements of IS014001:2004
• Quantify and monitor the significant environmental impacts of our activities, products and services and set specific targets for improvement where appropriate, and review these annually
• Integrate environmental objectives into our business decisions in a cost effective manner
• Require all staff to address environmental responsibilities within normal operating procedures
• Enhance awareness of environmental and resource efficiency issues amongst our customers, staff and stakeholders through all projects and programmes, where appropriate.

Our environmental improvement objectives for 2011-12 are to:

• Measure and reduce the environmental impacts from travel related to our activities
• Measure and implement ways to reduce energy consumption at our key sites.
• Introduce practices to reduce the environmental impacts of our events programme.
• Measure and implement ways to reduce the impact of our purchasing.
• Raise environmental awareness within the business community we support in order to promote resource efficiency and reduce waste.

To achieve this, Business West has established a Green Team with representatives from across the organisation, and will be involving all staff through communications, incentives and management.

Our Policy is reviewed annually.

Dated: 01/07/11

Review Date: 31/03/12