Register
The EMAS register is an online database hosted by the European Commission which lists all EMAS registered organisations and sites. Only those organisations and sites that have achieved EMAS registration are listed in the register, so you can feel confident that organisations found there are committed to improving their environmental performance.
Anybody can search the register and download the search results to Excel. You can look for organisations registered in a specific sector by filtering registrations by NACE codes, classifying economic activities. The list of NACE codes is available here. You can also look for the environmental statement of organisations, presenting their annual performance. If the environmental statement of an organisation is not available, we encourage you to contact them directly.
You can also find statistics on EMAS registrations here. These statistics are updated twice a year.
Note: the accuracy of the data provided in the Register is dependent on the information submitted by the individual EU Member States.
For more information on country-specific figures, please contact the national Competent Body.
Please note that you are now leaving the official EMAS website, as the EMAS Register is part of another domain.
EMAS does not set minimum performance requirements, but rather gives a chance to every organisation to implement the system that will make them improve their sustainability.
There are therefore no standards or documents with the minimum requirements available but you can consult the EMAS Regulation or the website to see the different steps that an organisation has to go through to attain EMAS registration. The EMAS requirements can be summarised as follows:
- Conduct an environmental review - The organisation itself must identify its environmental impacts and obligations.
- Adopt an environmental policy - The organisation has to set up an action plan to decrease its environmental impacts.
- Establish an environmental management system - To achieve its objectives, the organisation must set up procedures to assess and control its environmental performance.
- Carry out an internal environmental audit - The organisation must regularly assess whether the procedures in place are in line with its objectives.
- Prepare an environmental statement - The organisation needs to provide a public statement of its environmental performance. This includes compulsory indicators such as energy efficiency, material and water consumption, waste production and CO2 emissions. It lays down the results achieved against the objectives and the future steps to be undertaken in order to continuously improve the organisation’s environmental performance.
- Independent verification by an EMAS verifier - An independent verifier audits the organisation to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of its environmental strategy.
- Registration by a Competent Body - As a final step, the organisation registers with the appropriate public authority in the Member State.
Our section on “How does EMAS work” should answer all you initial questions. The steps are also summarised in a presentation of EMAS for organisations. Should you require further information, we invite you to get in touch with your relevant Competent Body.
Yes, there are penalties for non-compliance. Since EMAS is based on a Regulation, Member States are responsible for taking appropriate legal or administrative measures to resolve accidental non-compliance situations as quickly as possible. The main sanctioning instrument in the case of (ongoing) non-compliance with the Regulation is suspension or deletion from the EMAS register.
EMAS Clubs
EMAS Clubs are private non-profit associations on a regional level, composed of EMAS registered organisations and other EMAS stakeholders connected through a common interest for environmental best practices. An EMAS Club is a voluntary bottom-up initiative that allows its members to enjoy numerous advantages.
EMAS Clubs assist organisations who are already EMAS registered or who wish to join EMAS. The EMAS Clubs reach this objective by:
- Promoting EMAS to organisations and the general public
- Representing registered organisations and their interests towards governments and public authorities
- Providing a space for networking and shared experiences on environmental best practices
Joining an EMAS Club in your region will allow you to:
- Access exclusive networking opportunities and sources of information
- Exchange and create synergies with other members of the Club
- Participate in EMAS related events such as conferences, workshops or expositions
- Benefit from the Club’s expertise and information material on EMAS related topics
EMAS Clubs are private initiatives; there is no standard procedure for the founding of a new club. However, the following are points which might be worth considering when establishing a new EMAS Club in your region. Feel encouraged to contact the existing EMAS Clubs to seek first-hand advice.
Create a core group: A first step on the way to a new EMAS Club should be to find organisations willing to support the project. In the beginning, a small number of interested organisations is sufficient.
Contact public authorities: Obtaining the support of the responsible public authorities is an important step when establishing a new EMAS Club. The respective EMAS Competent Body should be involved at an early stage.
Establish funding for the Club: EMAS Clubs have different financing schemes. Ideally a club should find a good balance between public funding and its own private sources of income. Competent Bodies may be able to give the Club some financial support; however, the Club will need other ways of funding itself, for example through membership fees, by answering calls for tenders or by charging entry to non-members during events.
Showcase – EMAS Club Catalonia
As a bottom-up multi-sector association, Club EMAS Catalonia views itself as bridge between EMAS registered organisations and public administrations. The Club helps the two groups to better understand each other and identify common actions to be developed together.
Founded in 2006, it has been promoting EMAS based on a business-to-business approach with entrepreneurs sharing their EMAS success stories in the group. While collaborating with public authorities, Club EMAS acts as a lobby initiative to support its members by passing on feedback in order to improve regulations.
EMAS logo
The EMAS logo is a visual communication and marketing tool designed to highlight an organisation’s dedication to continually improving its environmental performance.
The logo may be used for marketing and promotional purposes by both EMAS-registered organisations and public stakeholders (such as Competent Bodies and Accreditation and Licensing Bodies).
The use of the logo raises awareness of EMAS to the public and interested parties and organisations seeking to improve their environmental performance. Importantly, the logo also signals legal compliance, local accountability, active employee involvement, reliability and credibility of the environmental achievements.
You can generate your EMAS logo using the Logo Generator. The Logo Generator can be used to generate the Emas III logo with a registration number in different image formats. By clicking on the following link the Logo Generator will be downloaded onto your computer in compressed format (.zip). To create your EMAS logo simply extract the compressed file, run the Logo Generator and follow the instructions:
logogenerator.zip
Printable versions of the EMAS logo in different formats can also be obtained from your national Competent Body.
- The logo can only be used by organisations in possession of a valid EMAS registration.
- The logo must always bear the organisation’s registration number, except for promotional and marketing activities related to EMAS.
- Only the official logo is valid.
- If the organisation has several sites, not all of which are included in the registration, it may use the logo only for those registered sites – in a way that does not give the impression that the entire organisation is registered.
- The organisation's environmental statement should bear the logo.
- The logo cannot be used on transport and tertiary packaging, or in other ways that could create confusion with environmental product labels.
- The logo should not be used with any comparative claims regarding other activities and services.
- The logo must not be used in ways that may cause confusion with other labels for products or services.
The EMAS Users Guide shows several uses of the EMAS logo.
- Use your EMAS logo in your correspondence – mail, fax, email, etc. or in elements handed out to your consumers or clients, such as metro tickets or bank account extracts. Let other people know that you are highly committed to sustainable environmental practices!
- Use the logo in your organisation’s internal documentsto help remind your employees of their workplace's green commitment.
- EMAS offers good advertising potential, so use the logo in media efforts to have a positive impact on your organisation's public image.
- The logo also stands out in marketing endeavours, whether it be advertising, catalogues, products or declarations.
Your regular use of the EMAS logo will increase the scheme's outreach and reflect your organisation’s commitment to sustainability!
For more in-depth information regarding the use of the EMAS logo and its potential benefits, please consult the document below.
Costs of EMAS registration
Several variables, including the size (micro, small, medium or large) and type (public or private) of organisations and the region in which they are registered, influence the costs of implementing EMAS. The following three categories of costs can be distinguished:
- Internal fixed costs: these are assumed to be unrelated to staff numbers and entail
- Validation and verification fees
- Registration fees
- Fixed costs of adding the EMAS logo to stationery and producing publicity material.
- Internal variable costs: relate to the internal resources required to implement the scheme and are affected by organisation size, number of employees and other variables.
- External costs: are incurred by employing external expertise – such as a consultant - to support EMAS implementation and reporting.
In-depth information on benefits and costs is available in the ‘Study on the Costs and Benefits of EMAS to Registered Organisations’ here.
As one of the requirements of EMAS, organisations need to publish an annual report on their performance, called the environmental statement. This report includes information on the organisation's environmental impacts and its actions to reduce them. It is publically available and is verified by an independent EMAS verifier, thereby providing the general public, public authorities and other stakeholders of the organisation (employees, clients, shareholders, etc.) with a wealth of reliable information on the organisation's contribution to sustainability. This data usually is not available for most companies in the EU. It shows the organisations' high level of commitment to transparency and enables authorities to focus on organisations that present potentially higher risks of non-compliance.
Check out examples of best environmental statements here.
According to Annex IV of the EMAS Regulation, the environmental statement entails the following information:
- a clear and unambiguous description of the organisation registering under EMAS and a summary of its activities, products and services and its relationship to any parent organisations, as appropriate;
- the environmental policy (objectives) and a brief description of the organisation's environmental management system (the procedures put in place to monitor its environmental performance);
- a description of all the organisation's significant direct and indirect environmental aspects that result in significant environmental impacts for it;
- a description of its environmental objectives and targets;
- a summary of the data available on the organisation's performance as measured against its environmental objectives and targets. Reporting is to cover the core indicators and other relevant existing environmental performance indicators as set out in the EMAS Regulation;
- other factors regarding environmental performance, including performance as measured against legal provisions;
- a reference to the applicable legal requirements relating to the environment; and
- the name and accreditation or licence number of the environmental verifier and the date of validation.
Environmental core indicators are introduced for more harmonised and thorough consideration of environmental issues. The core indicators focus on performance in the following key environmental areas:
- Energy efficiency: total direct energy use, including renewable energy use;
- Material efficiency: annual mass-flow of different materials used;
- Water: total annual water consumption;
- Waste: total annual generation of (hazardous) waste;
- Biodiversity: use of land; and
- Emissions: total annual emission of greenhouse gases and total annual air emission.
An organisation may decide not to report on a specific core indicator if it concludes that one or more indicators are not relevant to direct environmental aspects of the organisation (related to activities, products and services of the organisation over which it has direct management control). The organisation must then provide justifications.
The environmental statement can be linked with a sustainability report in three different ways:
1. The environmental statement or parts of it can be reproduced in the sustainability report even while the rest of the information in the sustainability report is not part of the environmental statement and is therefore not validated by an independant EMAS verifier. In that case, it is important to make a clear distinction between the part of the report which has been validated by the verifier and the rest of the sustainability report, which has not been audited at all. This could be done, for example, by applying the EMAS logo to the validated page (the environmental statement) and adding an introductory sentence explaining that only the pages bearing the EMAS logos are part of the validated statement.
2. The environmental statement or parts of it can be reproduced in the sustainability report while the rest of the sustainability report is audited in conformance with the AA1000 Assurance Standard or another standard, for example, the German IDW PS 821. This way the entire sustainability report is audited, as is increasingly the practice among large organisations. In that case, the environmental statement should also be clearly identified as part of the sustainability report. Please note that the audit of the sustainability report does not preclude validation of the Environmental Statement in the context of EMAS.
3. The EMAS registration is mentioned in the report, and the validated environmental statement provides the background to the sustainability report but is not a part of the report itself.
Please note that Member States may have their own additional specific requirements for linking the environmental statement with a sustainability report. For further information, please consult your Competent Body. You can access the contact details of your Competent Body here .
