CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGIES

Sustainable Development                                                                

Work for session 5:

Corporate environmental strategies

Part I:         Environmental management systems: ISO 14001

Questions:

1. What is an Environmental Management System?

 Nowadays, companies and organizations are passionate about protected the environment and fighting climate change; thus an environmental Management System is affective on global scale. Indeed, it’s a tool, which allows the companies and organizations to focus on their environmental responsibilities and helps them to manage the environmental impacts of their business and implement environment protection measures.

An Environmental Management System has many objectives

• Elevates the image of a business
• Reduce the environmental impact from their business
• Be different from the competitors - To control the costs, the waste

b) Present briefly the ISO 14001 principles and structure (the 5 steps and their requirements)

The document by the Australian EPA offers a nice synthesis of EMS (case of small businesses). You may find relevant information on the web site of the ISO + your own internet search

STEP 1: commitment of environmental policy.

It starts by securing the commitment by the owner and then to make the staff commit in too.

Consultation of the staff before the beginning of the process is important; it enables a willingness to adapt. Make the staff aware about the EMS make them find their own ideas about how to improve their comportment to better respect environment. Depending on the company staff number, it might point out someone who will be responsible of the good acting of the all team.

The owner might write an environmental policy because it’s a public statement of the responsibilities and obligations of everyone in the workplace.

The three keys of the three key elements of an environmental policy are a commitment to:

• prevent pollution
• continuous improvement
•  compliance with environmental
• regulations

So the first step is to make sure the staff is aware and to make a policy accessible for everyone.

STEP 2: Planning

Now the manager have to identify the environmental aspects and impacts of the business.

Environmental aspects are all areas of a business that can have an impact on the environment e.g. goods, services and processes.

Environmental impacts are the effects of these aspects on the environment, including air, noise, water (stormwater, groundwater, wastewater), soil, flora, fauna and people.

Impacts are not limited to those of the business, they gathered all the external factors (suppliers etc.…)

The second thing to do in planning the commitment is an environment action plan: prioritising all the impacts of the company’s activities to determine the actions the business have to remove or control the impact on the environment.

Urgent and high risks must be addressed immediately. The first response after deciding how to address the environment impact should be to remove the impact or follow the hierarchy of controls

Then there is the identification of legal requirements: It is essential to understand the legal requirements that apply to the business

Step 3: Implementation and operation

After identification of the environmental impact, we focus now on developing procedure to implement the actions. Implementing ISO 9001 at your company will involve your company's employees.

They are five kind of procedures:

• Elimination, which is the most preferable way to stop pollutions, eliminate all the sources of environment impact. As an example, a company could remove a packaging of its product.
• Substitution, this is when elimination is not possible. You should by consequent, try to use another substance or piece of equipment in order to reduce environmental impact.
• Engineering: during this procedure, change to the work place, machinery or equipment is introduce..
• Administration: this procedure has for objective to implement policies and procedure, provide training or changing workflows. This procedure involve all the company’s employees.
• Personal protective equipment is a short term and last resort procedure. Indeed, this procedure involve just providing staff with personal protective equipment to minimize the risk

Step 4: Checking and corrective action

In this step the main goal will be to establish a way of maintaining this system.

It is suggested to do a check list that would be completed weekly or monthly depending of the risks the impact could have. Checklist can also provide feedbacks to employees on how the business is performing.

Another way to keep an eye on the system is to perform audit. There are two kinds of audit:

• Internal audit: an external Audit is conducted by a person outside your organization such as a customer or an independent third party organization like a Registrar to verify you conform to the applicable requirements
• External audit: an internal Audit is used to assess conformity, evaluate effectiveness, and identify opportunities for improvement. Internal audits also help you prepare for external audits.

Midsize companies often appoint and train several internal auditors. This is an excellent opportunity for cross-training and for staff of different departments to learn what other departments are doing.

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