iiE – Our year in review

This has been a tremendous year of growth and change for iiE, with more interest in and demand for our support than ever before, from organisations looking to do their bit in response to the Climate Emergency.

As part of how we as an organisation helps others to really make a difference,  we set all of our members on a trajectory towards achieving Green level accreditation. This means not only boosting our support for organisations at Bronze and Silver level, but really encouraging our long-standing Green level members to expand their spheres of influence and increase the scope of environmental achievement across all areas of their business.

Some of our members took their achievements to the next level, winning recognition for their efforts in front of national audiences, including one achieving recognition for best green team at the IEMA Sustainability Impact Awards, and here at iiE we recognised excellent achievements of our members from specific geographic clusters at our annual awards ceremonies in April and June. 

We also ran a series of staff engagement campaigns and networking events, with the aim of making it easier for our members to communicate key messages around ending plastic pollution, excess printing, general waste reduction, and climate change. These include exciting digital posters and a new Zero Waste Week guide that our members have used to support staff and external engagement with their environmental projects.

We have also streamlined our annual audit and assessment process to make it easier for members to track their progress across the year, and instead spend more time carrying out the actions that will help them meet and exceed their targets on resource use and getting people on board with their environmental goals. This is an important differentiator for iiE – we support businesses on implementing Environmental Management Systems and we accredit them for taking substantive action on resources, carbon emissions, and contributing to their communities.

Looking forwards, there is much work to be done to help UK businesses make the transition to more sustainable ways of working. iiE continues to be an excellent way to help businesses take practical steps and make measurable progress on reducing carbon emissions and more.