Environmental policy template

An environmental policy forms the foundation of your organisation’s commitment to reducing its impact on the environment and your sustainability approach. It sets out your key aims, principles and responsibilities, and helps your business decide which areas require improvement. Although putting one in place is currently voluntary, an increasing number of businesses are choosing to do so, and it will likely become a standard policy requirement, particularly in relation to supply chain practices, in the future.

Having an environmental policy can provide significant benefits to your business. These include:

• Helping you to stay within the law
• Improving information for employees about their environmental roles and responsibilities
• Improving cost control
• Conserving resources, materials and energy
• Improving your monitoring of environmental impacts
• Improving the efficiency of your processes

Having an environmental policy is essential if you currently work or intend to work with large organisations, or if you need to demonstrate to customers and other stakeholders that you are committed to managing your environmental impacts in a responsible way.

As a minimum, your policy should contain a commitment to:

• Improve your environmental performance by monitoring progress against your targets
• Prevent pollution, minimise waste and reduce your organisations impact on the environment

Other areas of commitment, depending on how far you are along with your journey, may include:

• Recycling
• Sustainable transport
• Efficient use of water and energy
• Efficient use of other natural resources
• Responsible purchasing and supply chain management
• Use of non-toxic/environmental products within your business

CAFA have created this Environmental Policy Template for you to tailor to your own organisation. This can be used as a practical tool to engage and communicate with your employees and help to improve environmental processes in your everyday operations. You can download the policy below

We are working with the team at Climate Action for Associations (CAFA) to provide small businesses with practical guidance, steps and checklists to support your low carbon journey. CAFA are dedicated to accelerating business and industry climate action. CAFA provide resources, tools, guidance and peer to peer learning to drive greater, and quicker, climate action across whole systems, industries and supply chains.

This Environmental Policy Template is one of many straight-talking small business resources prepared by CAFA that we will be sharing to help you implement climate action in your business.

The Environmental Policy template is to be used as guidance to create own policy and can be tailored and amended to suit your business depending on what is most important to you.

For further support on your journey, see our other guides, tools and templates, including: