The ISO 14001 certificate, which covers BT’s UK based operations, endorses BT’s commitment to systematically improve the way in which environmental issues are managed by the company.
Businesses that implement an environmental management system expect to see positive bottom line benefits, usually within in six to 12 months. A spokesman told edie that BT hopes these benefits will accrue both indirectly from customer and shareholder approval of the corporate environmental awareness, and directly from reducing and recycling waste.
ISO 14001 is an international environmental standard that details how an environmental management system (EMS) should be defined and implemented.
The Chief Executive of BT, Sir Peter Bonfield said: “All the effort and investment we have made in achieving this standard is a sign of how seriously we take environmental responsibility across the company. Global industries with far-reaching environmental impacts are rightly coming under increasing pressure to be more environmentally efficient – more ‘green’. Today’s achievement shows that we have a real commitment to reduce our impact on the environment – and to keep reducing it.”
The assessment carried out for ISO 14001 certification involved examining a large number of sites ranging from large offices and laboratories to vans and remotely operated unmanned facilities. Since these sites are covered by a single set of environmental objectives, the whole business was treated as a single site. According to one of the two registrars involved in the assessment – Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA), a leading international assessor of management systems – this was the largest site yet to have been assessed to the standard.
The other registrar, British Standards Institution (BSI), registered the mobile telecommunications part of BT. BSI assessed the three main operational centres for the business, and a representative sample of base stations, switch centres and aerial sites throughout the UK.