We started our official environmental journey in 2016 by implementing an environmental management system throughout the company. This was the beginning of our target to achieve ISO14001:2015 at a time when the standard had recently been updated, which had brought in more rigorous criteria and only a handful of other companies had progressed to the 2015 updated standard. Once the management system was operational and changes within the company had been implemented, a few of which included switching bulbs to LED, a full recycling system and more efficient company cars, we were audited by an external certification body and granted the ISO 14001:2015 internationality recognised standard in May 2017.

Once a company has achieved the standard they are subjected to yearly surveillance audits until the time comes for re-certification. Part of these surveillance audits is to look for continual improvement within the company and to ensure that we continually consider our environmental impact, so we implemented our environmental steering group, who work to come up with new ideas to help reduce our carbon footprint and improve our environmental performance. As a result of ideas put forward to the steering group by staff we have now pledged 19 trees to be planted in areas where we have delivered courses and through this project with carbonfootprint.com we have offset approximately 19 tonne of C02 so far. We will continue to pledge one tree to each area we run our Returneeship courses from now on.

Moving forward Release Potential passed all of the yearly surveillance audits and the time came for re-certification. This audit is a full audit and looks at the complete system and scrutinises and stress tests the management system to ensure it is fully implemented and working as it should be and that it continues to meet all the criteria of the standard. We were granted re-certification and we received some fantastic feedback from the auditor, she was pleased with our performance and pleased with the development of the system. Our auditor praised the staff and company alike, she said that it was very obvious Release Potential really does care about its environmental impact. So as a company we wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been involved or has helped along the way and we would like to encourage you all to think more about your impact on the environment, a few small changes really can make a big difference.