Environmental Management System

Society is more environmentally aware than at any time in the past and as awareness grows so do concerns. It is increasingly difficult for organisations with poor environmental reputations to compete in today’s marketplace. Never has it been so important for organisations to manage their environmental impacts.

Environmental Management System
As with other aspects of management, what is needed is a systematic approach to environmental management, in other words an Environmental Management System (EMS).

There are numerous environmental management guidance tools such as the BS 8555 and Environmental Management Standards such as ISO 14001. BS 8555 gives guidance on how organisations might develop their EMS. ISO 14001 provides a framework on which to base an Environmental Management System. The System should be bespoke to your organisations needs if all of its benefits are to be realised.

The adoption of any Environmental Management Standard will likely improve environmental management for any organisation where no system previously existed. Some Standards are certifiable and some are not but only one has been developed to integrate seamlessly with other international Management Standards, ISO 14001. Before choosing your Standard consider first what you want from your Environmental Management System. If you already subscribe to other international Standards such as ISO 9001 or standards that have been developed to integrate with them such as OHSAS 18001, then it would probably be logical to adopt the ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard.

The Benefits of an Environmental Management System
Environmental Management Systems serve as a tool to improve your environmental performance. If your system is effective it should also:

There are other benefits that your Environmental Management System should realise but it is likely that you would need to be certified to a Standard to reap the rewards, such as:

The application of an Environmental Management System is well proven to help organisations to realise all of these benefits but there are reasons that some organisations never see any or all of these benefits including:

Using Your Environmental Management System
Management Systems, including Environmental Management Systems are based on the principles of Plan, Do, Check, Act as follows:

Plan
Identify the key legal requirements and industry best practice that pertain to your organisation. You will need to consider your environmental aspects and impacts and formulate plans that will enable you to control them. Your environmental aspects are your activities, products or services that interact with the environment and your impacts are the changes caused to the environment, whether beneficial or adverse, by your aspects.

Establish an environmental policy which reflects the expectations of management and stakeholders and includes a top level management commitment to your environmental management. Your policy should state your objectives and what arrangements you have put in place to achieve them.

Having written your environmental policy it cannot be left on the shelf to gather dust. It should be a living document with ever changing objectives as you continually improve your environmental management provisions. Your policy must be effectively communicated and to achieve this you may need to produce it in a number of formats. Pinning a copy on the notice board will not ensure that it is read nor that it is understood. You should monitor the understanding and effectiveness of your policy through audits.
The risk assessment process is key to successful environmental managing. You will need to identify all of your work tasks and risk assess any that present any significant environmental hazards. The outcomes from these assessments will help you to plan what needs to be done and which activities need to be dealt with as a priority.

Before putting your plan into action you will need to organise who will be responsible for what. Someone within your organisation should be identified to take responsibility for the day to day management of your Environmental Management System. This person would normally be referred to as your Environmental Management Representative or EMR. You don’t have to form an environmental management committee but it may help to do so.

Do
Implement your environmental plan. Take the outcomes from your environmental risk assessments and put them into place e.g. install cleaner machinery, implement your environmental emergency plans such as spill control etc. You may find that certain activities need to be controlled through the provision of written procedures.

Check
There are a number of ways in which we can measure the success of our environmental management. Informal tours by representatives or management tours can provide a relaxed approach for the day to day checks your Environmental Management System’s performance. Environmental audits and inspections provide a more structured means of measurement and they can be used to check whole work processes or specific inputs such as the maintenance and condition of a particular piece of equipment. The best way to check on how we are doing is to use a variety of measurement techniques. All checks, no matter how informal, should be recorded.

Act
Having put new environmental controls into place during the ‘Do’ phase, it is unlikely that everything will be perfect. This is where we act on our findings. Management will need to investigate why things have not gone according to plan and identify any failings. You may need to provide better equipment, identify cleaner raw materials, to provide training or to amend your environmental procedures. By analysing the outcome of your measuring activities management can also identify where opportunities exist for improvement of your Environmental Management System. Continual improvement is a fundamental requirement of Management Systems. The outcome from the ‘Act’ phase is fed back into the ‘Plan’ phase where you plan how you will improve and so the cycle goes on.

Getting Environmental Management Systems Right
The full time employment of an environmental expert is an excessive cost for many organisations, not to mention employing a management systems specialist but without the right level of knowledge it is unlikely that organisations will get the most from the management of their environmental provisions. Here at Lynwood we have specialists who can help with your ISO 14001 based Environmental Management System. They are also certified environmental practitioners. Give us a call to arrange your free of charge, no obligation initial consultation.