Going green: leading the way

The Green Level Investors in the Environment (iiE) accreditation is a real achievement and maintaining that for the fourth-year running is testament to all the hard work and dedication across the entire organisation throughout the year. 

The Green Group and I began planning towards our 2025 accreditation as soon as we had received our 2024 accreditation. This involved working through the iiE audit report and implementing actions from the recommendations noted, such as updating our green policies and partaking in the iiE sticker book initiative 

At the start of 2025, our group met to discuss plans for the year ahead and ideas for engagement with staff and members alike. We are always keen to communicate regularly with BVA staff to ensure they are up to date with progress and to share our monthly green calendar, which showcases our environmental projects and successes, and highlights key environmental days and challenges for staff to get involved with. 

In addition to this we updated our green induction process for new starters and external clients visiting BVA HQ, which includes info on the green group, our recycling streams, our waste/recycling carriers and our IIE accreditation. 

Our staff workshops and bi-annual updates allow us to share stories and provide further information on a host of green themes while we also arrange food and clothing bank donations and undertake litter picking events in the local area near HQ.  

In our HQ building itself, we continue to work closely with suppliers with strong green credentials and have renewed the contract with our green utility suppliers for electricity and gas. Improving our environmental management systems has also enabled us to reduce our measured resources across waste, recycling and utility usage.  

I’m most proud of the fact that everyone in the organisation has been engaged, it is very much a team effort. Since partnering with Investors in the Environment we have improved our sustainability credentials year on year, starting at bronze in 2020, moving to silver in 2021 and continuing with green level accreditation since 2022. We strive to continue to build on this success and stay as sustainable as we can in the years ahead.