Cliffe Enterprise has been independently certified to ISO 14001:2015, the international standard for environmental management.
It’s a certificate we’re pleased to have, but the reason we went after it is more interesting than the badge itself.
Why a print manager needs this more than a printer does
We manage print rather than manufacture it. There are no presses in our building, no ink, no solvent, no waste paper bales going out the back door. On paper — no pun intended — our own environmental footprint is small.
That’s exactly the problem.
Almost everything that matters environmentally about your job happens somewhere else: at the mill that made the paper, at the press that printed it, in the vehicle that delivered it, and in the recycling stream once your customer is finished with it. A print manager who only measures the electricity in their own office isn’t measuring anything meaningful.
ISO 14001 forces the wider view. The standard asks you to identify your environmental aspects and impacts across your whole operation — including the parts you influence rather than own — set objectives against them, and then be audited on whether you actually hit them. It’s a management system, not a statement of intent. That distinction is the whole point.
What we had to put in place
Getting certified meant formalising a lot of things we were already doing informally, and being honest about the gaps.
Supplier selection now carries environmental weight. Our approved supplier list was already built on quality and reliability. Environmental performance is now a scored part of that assessment, sitting alongside ISO 9001 accreditation, FSC chain of custody and press capability. If a printer can’t evidence how they manage waste, emissions and energy, that shows up in their score.
We measure what we specify. Paper choice, print process, run length, format, delivery consolidation — these are the decisions that determine a job’s impact, and they’re decisions we make with you at estimate stage. We now track them rather than treating them as a purely commercial choice.
Objectives with numbers attached. The standard doesn’t accept “we’ll try to do better.” We set measurable targets, review them, and get audited on the results. Where we miss, that has to be documented and corrected too.
Legal compliance is monitored, not assumed. Packaging waste regulations, WEEE, duty of care on waste transfer, UK GDPR on the mailing data side — all now sit in a register that’s actively maintained rather than checked when something goes wrong.
How this fits with what we already had
ISO 14001 slots into a framework that was already in place rather than sitting on its own:
ISO 9001:2015 — quality management, covering approved suppliers, documented order and proof review, and full traceability on every job
FSC Chain of Custody — paper traced through the supply chain back to responsibly managed forests
Carbon Negative (verified) — we measure our emissions annually and remove more than we produce
Cyber Essentials — the NCSC-backed scheme covering the controls that protect client artwork, data files and mailing lists
ICO registration — mailing data handled under UK GDPR from receipt through to secure disposal
The quality system and the environmental system share the same supplier approval process, the same document control, the same audit discipline. Adding 14001 tightened both.
What it means for you
If you’re procuring print for a public sector body, a university, a charity or a listed company, you’ll already know the answer: environmental accreditation is increasingly a gateway requirement on tenders and PQQs, not a nice-to-have. Having ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 together, both independently assessed and current, clears a question that used to need explaining.
More practically, it means the environmental claims we make about your job are backed by a system that someone external checks. If we tell you a specification reduces impact, there’s an auditable basis for it.
And if you need documentation for your own reporting, we can supply it. Certificates and scope statements are available on request, along with paper certification and carbon data for individual jobs.
Talk to us
If you’d like a copy of the certificate, our scope statement, or a conversation about how specification choices affect the environmental profile of your print, get in touch.
01323 419 701
You can see our full list of certifications at cliffe-enterprise.com/certifications.