ISO14001 Certificate Equivalent

Environmental certification

Green Small Business certification can be achieved from only £199+tax per year.

It’s a trusted, small business-friendly alternative to ISO 14001 certification. Use it to demonstrate your environmental credentials, meet tendering or funding requirements or increase your BCorp impact assessment score.

To gain certification, you will need to put an environmental policy and action plan in place for your business, and then demonstrate ongoing improvement in the management of your environmental impacts. You can prepare these documents yourself or let us take the strain.

If you purchase our environmental management system package we will do the necessary work for you and certification in the first year is included in the price.

To develop the policy and action plan yourself:

The Green Small Business Handbook, is our free step-by-step guide, containing all the guidance you need to successfully create your own environmental management system. The handbook takes you step-by-step through the process of preparing your Environmental Policy and Environmental Action Plan.
You can also purchase our ‘Making it Easy’ pack, containing templates and examples of environmental policies and plans which can be used and adapted to suit your business.
When you’re ready, click here to order certification for your Green Small Business.
We will review your documents, help improve them where we can and issue your certification.

Requirements for certification

Every business is unique, and every environmental management system should be too.

To achieve Green Small Business certification, we won’t give you a list of standards or criteria to meet. Because your business is unique, we will simply look for two things:

Do you have a stated commitment to improving the management of all of the significant environmental impacts of your business?
Do you have a policy and action plan in place to deliver that commitment?

Each year, to renew your certification you will need to demonstrate ongoing improvement in the management of your environmental impacts.

It’s as simple as that. It means we welcome businesses of all types and all levels of environmental ambition.

The ISO 14001 alternative for small business

ISO 14001 is the international standard for environmental management systems. Traditional environmental management systems like ISO 14001 can work really well for bigger businesses. In theory, they are also suitable for small businesses.

In practice, they require levels of time and money that are beyond what most small businesses can sustain. The evidence suggests that, when it comes to businesses at the smaller end of the scale, standard environmental management systems are often not fit for purpose.

That’s where Green Small Business comes in. We can work with you to develop a policy and action plan, following similar principles to ISO 14001 but allowing you to gain independent environmental certification in a way that is proportionate to the size and environmental impacts of your business.

Certification can be valuable for marketing purposes, meeting tendering requirements, increasing your BCorp score or just demonstrating your environmental credentials.

“Having a baseline number for the carbon footprint of our business allows us to measure changes that we make to reduce this. Without an actual figure, it is easy to think that what we are doing is lessening our environmental impact, when it may not be having the kind of impact we hoped. Being certified will show that we are serious in reducing the environmental impact of the business – not just ‘greenwashing’.”

“Green Small Business certification will help decrease both the company’s and supply chain’s carbon footprint and it provides the credentials to support and develop our environmental policy.”

“We’re at the start of our Carbon reduction journey and Tim has helped to guide us through our first footprint measurement. We now have a much better understanding of the process and the data we need to include in our footprint, he has also helped us to identify improvements we can make to get better data for future measurements.”

“Being Green Small Business certified means that when we approach funders we can demonstrate our commitment to the environment. This is something that most funders and grant-making organisations require now. If we couldn’t demonstrate this it’s highly likely we would lose funding opportunities to competitors.”

“Being a Certified Green Small Business is the perfect way for us to communicate our environmental commitment and credibility to clients, employees, and other stakeholders.”

“The Green Small Business process has been practical and helpful. The certification allows us to shout more loudly about all our efforts on sustainability.”

“We want to help our clients improve their own social footprint simply by using us as their catering partner. Being a certified Green Small Business supports our own credentials, and has helped us focus on certain aspects that we hadn’t considered previously.”

“The whole process was really smooth and simple and we are delighted with the results.”

“The Green Small Business approach gives us a structure to work with and aim for, rather than feeling the task of being green feeling too big to achieve and beyond our finances.”

“It was great to get some affirmation for our efforts up to this point. What we found useful was the extra research that Green Small Business did for us and pointing us in the right direction.”

“We decided to do it because it’s a good thing for the business and help save on costs. The process is really simple, straightforward and convenient”

Rachel Bailey Garden Design Ltd

Environmental certification

To develop the policy and action plan yourself:

Requirements for certification

The ISO 14001 alternative for small business

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