Why We Chose ISO14001: A Standard That Changes How We Work
There’s no shortage of frameworks designed to demonstrate responsible business. But at EWGA, we think the more important question isn’t “Which badge do you have?” It’s “What does it actually change?”
That’s why we chose ISO 14001.
As a wine importer and wholesaler, our environmental footprint doesn’t begin and end at our offices. Our operation spans international sourcing, transport and logistics, warehousing, our own delivery fleet, packaging, energy use, and purchasing decisions.
We needed a framework that reflected that complexity.
ISO 14001 gave us exactly that: an internationally recognised and independently audited environmental management system built around understanding environmental impacts, setting measurable objectives and continually improving performance.
And we didn’t make the decision in isolation. Through conversations with a cohort of like-minded local businesses from similar industries – people facing the same questions about sourcing, logistics and supply chains that we were – we looked at what meaningful environmental management should actually look like in practice, not just on paper.
Those conversations mattered because generic frameworks rarely account for the realities of a specific sector; what works for a retailer or a manufacturer doesn’t necessarily translate to a wine importer moving stock across borders and through multiple warehouses. Comparing notes with businesses who understood those pressures gave us a far clearer picture of what a genuinely useful environmental management system needed to do.
Rather than asking us simply to demonstrate our values, it asks us to examine how the business actually operates. That means turning our attention to the areas where we can genuinely make a difference: transport, fuel, packaging, waste, energy use and sourcing, purchasing and our wider supply chain.
These aren’t abstract environmental categories for us. They’re part of the everyday process of getting wine from vineyards around the world into glasses here in the UK, as efficiently and responsibly as we can.
Continual Improvement in Practice
The part of ISO 14001 we’re most excited about is that it doesn’t ask us simply to reach a standard and stop – we’re accountable for continual improvement. And that accountability doesn’t sit with one person or one department. It encourages small, practical changes across the whole business.
That’s something we’ve increasingly been encouraging through our own “What’s your 1%?” initiative: the idea that everyone within EWGA can identify small changes that make what we do just 1% better.
Noni’s 1% was reconfiguring every computer across the business to default to sleep mode after 15 minutes of inactivity and shut down automatically after a set period. It’s a small settings change, but one with a cumulative effect on energy use.
Sam’s was switching everyone’s default printing to black and white, cutting unnecessary colour printing without anyone having to think twice about it.
Neither change is dramatic on its own, but that’s exactly the point.
Continual improvement isn’t always about one enormous initiative. It can be dozens of small decisions, made by people across a business, becoming part of the way that business operates.
Over months and years, those 1% improvements begin to add up.
And for us, that is ultimately why ISO 14001 was the right choice. It doesn’t allow environmental responsibility to become something we achieved once, wrote about and moved on from.
It keeps asking the more useful question:
What are you going to do better next?