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Environmental Management Systems - A short why, what and how

ISO 14001 is the international standard for environmental management systems. The 2015 version is the latest iteration of the standard, and has been aligned with the other management systems standards for easy integration.

Why must we as organizations be concerned with environmental management, and certainly it is not for the leadership of the company to worry about it? The simple answer is that the activities of our organizations impact negatively on the environment, and as business leaders we should be concerned about it. It impacts on the concept of sustainability of organizations, and particularly on environmental sustainability, which affects all of us. Environmental sustainability has been defined as:

The ability to maintain rates of renewable resource harvesting, pollution creation and non-renewable resource depletion that can be continued indefinitely

This definition sums up the necessity for environmental management for every organization in very clear terms: 
  • We are using renewable resources, but the harvest is limited to our harvesting capacity
  • We create pollution on an ongoing basis, 24/7
  • We are using non-renewable resources, which has a limit to the point where we will not be able to harvest anymore, because it has become economically not viable, or we ran out of certain resources
There is a lot of literature available on our effects on the environment. There is a lot of statutory and regulatory requirements that are imposed on us, regionally, nationally and internationally. The problem lies in how we manage an overall, all-inclusive environmental management system in the organization.

ISO 14001:2015 is a good standard to apply, but there are a lot of practical issues. What do we need to specifically manage? How does my organization actually impact on the environment? How does the environment impact on my organization?

Apart from mandatory requirements imposed on the organization through legislation, and, in some cases, by parent organizations and customers, there are other external groups which can also impact on the organization because of their environmental requirements (we know them as interested parties or stakeholders). These parties include financial parties, neighbourhood communities, the media, environmental pressure groups, governmental and regulatory bodies, to name but a few. Our environmental performance has an impact on these groups, typically in the form of:
  • Fulfillment of commitments
  • Quantitative information about emissions, discharges and hazardous waste
  • Information regarding environmental inputs
  • Impact on quality of life surrounding the organization (noise, odour, vibration, visual impacts, etc)
  • Climate change
  • Trans-boundary pollution
  • Etc
There are also a lot of financial impacts:
  • Investments for improving environmental performance
  • Commercial advantage
  • Cost of compliance and cost of non-compliance (legal)
  • Trade issues
  • Etc
The question is: In the light of all the above, where do we start? We start by analyzing what aspects of our organizations activities can potentially impact on the environment.

Environmental aspects: Any element of an organization's activities, products or services that can interact with the environment.

Environmental impacts: Any change to the environment resulting from the organization's activities, products or services, either positive or negative (in other words, from the environmental aspects of the organization 

When we start to assess our environmental aspects that could impact on the environment, we need to consider:
  • Chemical aspects (or hazards):
  • Solids
  • Liquids
  • Airborne mists
  • Physical aspects (or hazards)
  • Noise
  • Heat
  • Vibration
  • Radiation
  • Etc
  • Biological aspects (or hazards)
  • Molds
  • Fungi
  • Bacteria
  • Viruses (Yes COVID-19 is an environmental issue!)
  • Protozoa
  • Parasites
  • Etc
Environmental impacts resulting form these agents include pollution through:
  • Air emissions
  • Process and waste discharges
  • Waste generated (hazardous and non-hazardous)
  • Soil contamination
  • Habitat destruction
  • Energy and raw material consumption
  • Etc
It is important that we apply specific methods to help us recognize environmental aspects and their associated impacts. 

A simple method that is helpful to get us going, is to start by looking at the organization as a whole, its inputs, activities, and outputs.

Helpful methods include planned inspections and job and operational analysis. We can use task analysis, etc, to go through all our processes to help us identify significant aspects and impacts. Significance can be judged qualitatively or quantitatively.

More about this will follow in future blogs.

Please feel free to leave a comment or to contact me directly if you want more information, or if you would like to share your thoughts.

I can be contacted at koosgouws10@gmail.com

Please visit our website at sheqmanagementsystem.co.za!

Until next time

Koos

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