Twelve things we do, ordered by how urgent they usually are.

An energy audit is an inspection and survey of the energy flowing through a building, process or system, and of how much of that input could be removed without anyone noticing except the finance department.

The building survey records the envelope — walls, ceilings, floors, doors, windows — measuring the area and thermal resistance of each element, along with the rate at which air infiltrates through it. Both are strongly affected by construction quality and the state of seals and weatherstripping. Professional equipment such as blower doors and infrared cameras makes the invisible parts visible. The audit also assesses the condition and efficiency of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and controls.

You receive a written report estimating energy use against local climate data, thermostat settings, solar orientation and roof geometry, together with the modelled effect of each suggested improvement. Accuracy improves considerably when one or two years of billing history is available, since consumption can then be calibrated against heating and cooling degree-day data from actual weather records.

Some of the largest effects on energy use are behavioral, so for occupied buildings we usually interview the people who use the space. The objective is not only to list where energy goes, but to rank the interventions from most to least cost-effective — while keeping comfort, health and safety intact.

Buildings may also qualify for energy efficiency grants from government programs and international donors, and the audit report is normally the document those applications are built on.

An ISO certificate is a third party's confirmation that your organization runs one of the internationally recognized management systems properly. To audit those systems, Metria works with SGS — the world's leading inspection, verification, testing and certification organization, and a long-standing industry leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.

ISO 9001 sets the requirements for a quality management system, used to demonstrate consistent delivery of products and services that meet customer and regulatory requirements.

ISO 14001 is the standard for an environmental management system. Rather than fixing environmental performance targets for you, it gives a long-term framework within which you set and improve on your own.

ISO 45001 covers occupational health and safety management, aimed at reducing work-related injury and ill health. It replaced OHSAS 18001, whose migration period closed in 2021 — certificates against the old standard are no longer valid.

ISO 50001 covers energy management, and pairs naturally with an energy audit where consumption is a material cost or a material emission source.

ISO 26000 is worth flagging separately: it is guidance on social responsibility, not a certifiable standard. Anyone offering to certify you against it is selling something else. We use it as a structuring document for CSR programs, which is what it is for.

The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive phase on 1 January 2026. Emissions embedded in goods imported into the EU during 2026 now carry a real certificate cost. Importers must hold authorised declarant status, file an annual declaration, and surrender certificates against verified emissions — the first of those falling due on 30 September 2027, with a penalty of €100 for every tonne left uncovered.

Six sectors are covered: cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, together with precursors such as cement clinker, nitric acid, ferrosilicon and unwrought aluminium. Georgia is unusually exposed. Analysis published for UNDP in 2026 identifies fertilisers as the most affected Georgian sector, with iron and steel exposure rising as the EU-bound share of production grows.

The obligation sits legally with your European importer, not with you. But the data does not exist on their side of the border. They will ask you for it, and what you are able to give them decides the number.

This is the part worth understanding. Where actual installation-level emissions cannot be evidenced, default values apply instead, and those are set deliberately high. For an efficient producer — an electric arc furnace running local scrap, a plant drawing on its own hydro — the real figure is often materially better than the default. Without the data to prove it, you pay the penalty for someone else's inefficiency.

The timing problem is the one most exporters miss: the 2026 emissions year is already running. Every month without proper monitoring is a month of production that will have to be estimated rather than evidenced.

We do the installation-level work behind that number — defining boundaries, mapping production routes, building a monitoring methodology that holds up, collecting activity data, calculating embedded emissions under the CBAM rules, and assembling the package your importer needs. Then we prepare you for verification.

From 27 September 2026 the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive is enforceable in all twenty-seven EU member states. It amends the unfair commercial practices rules, so it is enforced by national consumer authorities, and penalties reach 4% of annual turnover in the member state concerned.

Four things become unlawful. Generic environmental claims — “eco-friendly”, “green”, “natural” — without demonstrated excellent environmental performance. Sustainability labels not based on a certification scheme or public authorisation, which rules out any logo you designed yourself. Claims of neutral or positive impact resting on offsetting, which effectively ends product-level “climate neutral”. And claims about a whole product that concern only one part or one life stage. Brand names implying environmental benefit are in scope too.

The separate Green Claims Directive was withdrawn by the Commission in June 2025 and is not coming. We mention it because a good deal of advice still sells readiness for it — worth checking the date on anything you have been given.

We inventory every environmental claim you make, across packaging, website, retail material and social media; classify each as compliant, substantiable or must-change; supply replacement wording; and build the substantiation file behind the claims you keep. You end up with a claims register you own and maintain, which is what an enforcement authority would ask to see.

If you sell business-to-business rather than to consumers, you are not directly caught — but your customers are, and the substantiation requirement will reach you through contracts instead of law. We will tell you which of those two situations you are in before you buy anything.

Compliance verification confirms that a product, service or project meets all relevant codes and regulations. It is most often carried out by or for a government body.

Financial institutions run the same exercise for a different reason: to confirm that lending requirements have been satisfied before a loan is approved, or as a condition attached to releasing further advances on a construction or development facility. Where a drawdown depends on verified progress, the verification is on the critical path, and delays are expensive.

We prepare the evidence, run the inspection, and produce documentation in the form the requesting institution expects — which is usually the part that takes longest when organizations attempt it alone.

An environmental risk assessment establishes how likely your operation is to cause harm to the environment: what the hazards are, what damage they could do, and what precautions reduce the risk. The method closely resembles the health and safety risk assessment your organization already performs, which makes it easier to adopt than most people expect.

There are five steps: identify the hazards; describe the harm each could cause; evaluate the likelihood and identify precautions; record the results and implement those precautions; and review the assessment at regular intervals.

Hazards worth looking at in most businesses include waste storage and disposal, and whether containers sit clear of watercourses; the environmental profile of raw materials, including potentially toxic metals; storage, use and final disposal of hazardous substances; emissions of dust and other substances to air; liquid waste drainage and disposal; and the environmental cost of packaging.

Some of these areas carry statutory minimum standards. Where a development proposal may have significant environmental impact, a full Environmental Impact Assessment is the appropriate instrument, and we will tell you when that threshold has been crossed.

The Global Reporting Initiative is the independent standards organization whose framework lets businesses, governments and other organizations describe their impacts on issues like climate change, human rights and corruption in a way third parties can compare.

First launched in 2000, the framework is now used by multinationals, governments, SMEs, NGOs and industry groups in more than ninety countries. In 2017, 63% of the largest hundred companies and 75% of the Global Fortune 250 applied it — and adoption has continued to widen since.

The Universal Standards were restructured in 2021 into a modular set: GRI 1 for the reporting principles, GRI 2 for general disclosures about the organization, and GRI 3 for how you determine and manage material topics. Topic Standards then supply the specific disclosures — the 300 series for environmental matters such as energy, water, biodiversity, emissions and waste, the 400 series for social ones, the 200 series for economic. Sector Standards add expectations for high-impact industries.

What this means in practice is that a GRI report is not a document you write; it is a set of numbers you produce, plus the explanation of how you got them. Most of our work is on the first part.

Impact investing means putting capital into companies, organizations and funds with the intention of generating a measurable social or environmental benefit alongside a financial return. It is a subset of socially responsible investing, but with an important difference: where socially responsible investing largely avoids harm, impact investing actively seeks to produce a positive result.

Which raises the obvious problem. An intention is easy to state and hard to verify, and the gap between the two is where greenwashing and falsified reporting live. An independent audit of the investee is the practical answer, and financial institutions increasingly require one.

Our consultants help investors integrate environmental, social and governance factors into due diligence: identifying the risks that could impair the investment and the opportunities for value creation that could improve it. The same information keeps working after the transaction, giving the investor and the management team a shared basis for improving ESG and financial performance together.

The evidence for doing this is not only ethical. A 2018 study by the Global Impact Investing Network found that over 90% of impact investors reported their investments meeting or exceeding expectations.

The action plan is both strategic and tactical: it gathers the initiatives and changes an organization is committing to, then names the targets, actions and indicators that will show whether any of it is working.

The single most valuable thing you can do before spending money on specific green initiatives is to understand how sustainability touches your business model, your value chain and your products. Without that, spending goes to whatever is most visible rather than whatever is most consequential.

We build the plan around your goals, risks and opportunities, the external and internal pressure you are under, and the resources you actually have. We can also design the monitoring: toolkits for implementation, benchmarking between projects, and survey work where you need primary data rather than assumptions.

Implementing sustainability is a journey with no final destination. The plan is what stops that from being an excuse.

The most successful organizations are increasingly the ones asking how they create value for society, not only for shareholders. Employees and customers are the ones applying that pressure, and they are unusually good at spotting the difference between a commitment and a poster.

Our position is that every company, regardless of size, sector or location, should begin by identifying its most important impacts on the environment, economy and society — and then keep going: measure, manage, change. Responsible CSR and ESG reporting is focused action on what matters and where it matters most. In the broader frame, that also means addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which explicitly call on business to apply creativity and innovation to the problem.

The rewards are not abstract. Keeping the world habitable is the strongest reason, but research from well-recognized institutions consistently finds that responsible companies can look at the future with more confidence than their peers — and in a connected, transparent economy, credible reporting is the foundation for every other kind of communication.

Our aim is to simplify this far enough that a small company with limited resources can still do it properly: see risk early, act before it escalates, and notice the opportunities that come with having your radar switched on.

Doing good work matters. So does saying so. Companies should be able to be proud of a genuine commitment, and studies keep finding that employees repay it with loyalty. We know the international reporting standards well enough to produce sustainability reports that are both recognized and readable.

The most common failure in this field is not dishonesty. It is dullness. It comes from corporate vocabulary, from a tone that stays clinical and academic because the subject feels serious, and from bragging — boastful content that turns readers off within a page.

The harder and more valuable move is talking about failure. Most companies avoid it, often with good intentions: they do not want to seem to be showing off, or they worry that admitting a problem without a solution is risky. But an organization that has had a problem, reported it clearly and accurately, and explained what it did about it, gets to be its own ombudsman — reviewing its own progress on difficult issues before anyone else does. It also earns goodwill for being honest, transparent and accountable, which no amount of polished language buys.

We use storytelling, photography, video and games for assessment and for communication, and we run workshops and publications — because social responsibility is not a luxury, it is a matter of good manners and professionalism.

Georgia's green economy policy direction has two halves: neutralising the consequences of earlier careless environmental management, and preserving what remains so that the country is credibly perceived as having a green economy.

The practical consequences have been arriving steadily. An atmospheric air standard allowing state bodies to measure air quality in line with EU practice, supported by an automatic monitoring network and public reporting of results. A taxation preference system for eco-friendly transport, with higher rates on large-engine vehicles to encourage hybrid and electric purchases. An environmental ombudsman, and tighter regulation of petrol and diesel contamination.

For an organization, none of this is a communications exercise. It is a change management problem: new measurement obligations, new cost lines, new reporting, and staff who need to do things differently. We work with public and private sector bodies on that transition — assessing exposure, sequencing the response, and building the internal capability so the change survives after we leave.

Pressure from outside the country changed shape in early 2026, and it is worth being precise about how. The EU narrowed its corporate sustainability reporting rules sharply in March 2026: far fewer companies must report, and suppliers with 1,000 employees or fewer gained a legal right to refuse data requests that go beyond the Voluntary SME Standard. If someone has told you that European buyers will soon compel you to produce a full sustainability report, that is no longer true for most Georgian companies.

What replaced it is narrower and firmer. The Voluntary SME Standard is now the ceiling on what a large buyer may ask — which makes it the exact specification worth preparing against. Not because you are obliged to, but because when two suppliers are compared and one can answer the buyer's questionnaire in a week while the other cannot answer it at all, the contract tends to follow the first. We prepare that disclosure, and we will tell you plainly when you do not need one.