How to Build an Environmental Policy

At Assembly, we have been on a journey to transform the impact we have on our planet. Over the past 2 years, we have put a variety of systems in place to help us monitor and understand the emissions, allowing us to put in place solutions that help us decrease our impact. Not only has this been a transformation journey for us, it’s also been a learning journey. We have had to take the time to educate ourselves in order to improve. As we understand first-hand how overwhelming this change can seem, we want to put out content that helps other agencies in a similar position to us improve.

The start of your journey begins with outlining your priorities, and to do this, all businesses that take their environmental responsibility seriously need to have a robust environmental policy in place. In 2023 we relaunched our environmental policy. It now outlines our core values, beliefs and steps we need to take to manage our environmental impact.

What is an environmental policy?

An environmental policy is a commitment to ensuring environmental responsibility throughout your business. It should form the foundations of your approach to managing your environmental impact and be the framework for you to set your environmental goals and objectives.

In order to ensure ours was top of class we worked with Anthesis, a global consultancy that help their clients with their sustainable performance, to update and improve our old policy. With Anthesis we worked on what was best practice (our policy is written to ISO14001:2015 standards), what needed to be included that was relevant to our business and industry, and what aspects of the business it needed to cover.

What questions should you ask yourself before drafting an environmental policy?

To help guide the content of your environmental policy, we would recommend asking yourselves the following questions to help with your structure:

• Does my company have environmental goals/targets that need to be met?
• How does the industry we function in impact the environment?
• As a company, what is achievable for us to manage from an environmental performance perspective?
• How can we raise awareness of environmental performance throughout the company?
• What do we need to work on as a company to improve our environmental performance?

Once we had done this ourselves, we outlined five environmental impact areas that we have a direct impact on as a business:

1. The operations of our offices
2. The clients we work with
3. Our supply chain
4. Our media partners
5. The campaigns we run

To help you understand how your environmental policy can support the environmental impact areas you have outlined, below are some suggestions of actions you can take and cement within your policy.

Transforming your office operations within your policy

To understand your full environmental impact as a business, the best place to start is get your house in order first. Looking at the environmental impact of your offices and committing to change in your environmental policy is a great way to get the ball rolling. We would recommend outlining the following steps to help embed this within your policy:

• Have a robust environmental management system in place that helps you to monitor and reduce waste, water usage and energy usage throughout your offices and specify aligning this with the strategic direction of the company.
• Engaging with your office landlords and facilities teams to help improve the above areas and implementing new processes to help your offices reduce each area.
• Communicating the environmental impact of your operations with staff and commit to bringing them on the learning journey with you. We have found that you cannot successfully implement change without having your people on board, so ensure they understand your strategy and the reasons behind it, and outline this educational commitment in your policy.

Supporting clients on their environmental journeys in your policy

If, like us, you are an advertising agency; clients will be a core part of your business. It is likely that a lot of your clients will have their own environmental impact targets that they have to achieve. As you will be a part of their scope3 emissions, your environmental policy is an opportunity to showcase your environmental commitment and help open conversations about both of your environmental goals. We suggest adding the following points to your policy surrounding this subject:

• Ensure you have outlined having or setting reduction targets that will reduce your overall emissions and therefore affect your client’s scope 3 emissions.
• Make sure you promote raising awareness amongst your clients about the positive moves you are making towards environmental impact and specify the intention to collaborate.
• Outline exploring any further ways you can work to support your clients on their environmental goals.

Understanding your supply chain and working with partners to understand their environmental impact on your policy

A large amount of your impact will sit within your scope 3 emissions, a large part of which will be your supply chain. Having your environmental policy in place is a great way to showcase to your suppliers and partners your environmental commitments, helping communicate to them the importance of this to you as a business. Regarding advertising specifically, media partners are a large part of an agency’s Scope3, so it’s also important to outline a workstream that helps you understand the impact of their services on the environment. We recommend outlining the following points surrounding your supply chain within your environmental policy

• Outline exploring integrating sustainability criteria into your procurement process.
• Make sure they are complying with the applicable legislation, regulations, and codes of practice.
• Highlight that you champion innovating reduction solutions in collaboration with suppliers and partners.

Understanding the environmental impact of any campaigns you run

This is again very specific to advertising; however, our environmental impact extends beyond our immediate operations and supply chain. There are also significant emissions attached to advertising campaigns that we run because of our business. These emissions will be caused at every aspect of the advertising process, starting from creation, and moving through to launch. There are many avenues you can explore to help your business and your clients understand the emissions that are produced at a campaign level. Here are a few ways you can commit to supporting this within your environmental policy:

• If you participate in working groups looking to create solutions for your industry, make sure these are outlined. For example, we are a member of Ad Net Zero.
• Research into technology that can support you on this journey, particularly during stages such as planning and reporting.
• Talk to your existing measurement partners about whether they can provide any supporting metrics that will allow you to understand the environmental impact of this campaign, e.g. tCo2e per impression.

Once you have understood what points need to be outlined within your environmental policy to support your impact areas, this then needs to be formatted and formalised into a document. We have outlined below a few other pointers to help elevate your environmental policy.

• Begin with a supporting statement from your CEO. This will help outline the importance of this document, filtering from the top down.
• After this, have an overarching statement that outlines your general strategy and commitments.
• Highlight what your main environmental impact areas as a business are within the document.
• Following this, map out your points of action in a concise list. Make sure you try not to go into too much detail, as this can be outlined in a wider strategy document.
• Outline how you intend to effectively communicate this policy.
• Highlight any already existing actions that will support the success of your environmental policy.  

You can see Assembly’s full policy here as an example.

We hope this blog provided good guidance to either creating or upgrading your environmental policy. At the impact team we are always keen to collaborate and discuss topics surrounding environmental impact within our industry, so please get in touch at impact@assemblyglobal.com if you would like to connect!