Identifying business activities that have the potential to affect the environment is important for effective environmental management.
Companies that recognize the positive and negative environmental impacts of their business are better able to mitigate the negative impacts and maintain the positive. Implementing a comprehensive environmental management system (EMS) can be difficult and time consuming but can be made easier with the right tools and knowledge.
EHS (environmental, health, and safety) and EMS platforms have become a useful tool for data collection, process improvement, and regulatory compliance.
Activities, aspects, and impacts are the main components for identifying, tracking, and managing environmental effects. Activities are business services or products that are offered to the market or those needed to operate the business. Aspects are elements of an activity that can interact with the environment. Impacts are the positive or negative effects that result from the aspect. These components will help you understand the interactions between business operations and the environment. Based on the significance of the impact, actions can be identified to reduce risks and stay in good environmental standing.
To identify aspects and impacts, you must start by identifying company activities. These can include both routine and non-routine activities. For example, regular HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) usage and maintenance is necessary for many facilities for normal operations and comfort. HVAC units interact with various environmental categories (e.g., air, water, waste). Aspects associated with HVAC units include emissions from refrigerants and fuel combustion, waste from used oil during maintenance, and spills to water during fuel refilling or repairs. Aspect related impacts can include those associated with public health, the environment, legal, and company reputation. For this example, impacts include mainly environmental and legal impacts. Spills to water can pollute waterways and violate stormwater permits, emissions can reduce air quality and contribute to climate change, and hazardous waste can be a safety risk and can pollute the environment if not properly managed, which can also be a compliance risk.
Identifying the aspects and impacts from your business will help determine which activities need to be included as part of your environmental management program. This will help your business be regulatory compliant, reduce negative effects from your business and hazards for employees, and increase resource and operating efficiencies.
While having an EMS implemented is not required, there are many benefits of having one and it will help manage aspects that are required. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001 standard provides a framework for developing an EMS. The goal of ISO 14001 is to help companies implement a system that prevents and mitigates adverse environmental impacts, reaches company goals, find financially beneficial efficiencies, and influences company operations by finding new considerations within a product’s or service’s lifecycle to minimize environmental impacts. 1
The ISO 14001 standard guides companies through creating and implementing effective mitigation and management strategies for the identified aspects and impacts. The framework includes guidance on identifying the needs of the company and defining the scope of the EMS, roles and responsibilities within the organization, actions and initiatives for managing impacts, and how to assess performance of your management system. These are important components for ensuring your management plan is comprehensive and has proper oversight.
When developing your EMS, finding a software solution can be essential to the success of your management plan. Let’s explore some of the ways EHS software can help manage your aspects and impacts.
A useful software will help identify the environmental impacts that your management system needs to address. EHS software can help walk you through the process of identifying activities, aspects, and impacts. A valuable software system should not only help you identify these aspects but also determine the significance of the impacts. Determining the significance of the impact can include how many environmental categories are affected, whether the aspect is normal or abnormal, and the magnitude of risk (e.g., for legal risks, the issue may not be regulated, or it is, and violations could result in fines or criminal action). This also gives the opportunity to identify regulations relevant for specific aspects and activities. Having software that can assist in this process will help you focus on which aspects prioritize based on the significance.
Once the aspects are identified and prioritized, companies must set goals for what they want to achieve with their EMS. These goals can be related to reducing negative impacts or expanding upon positive impacts. Goal setting is a crucial step for developing your management strategy as it helps guide decision making and drive continuous improvement. Leveraging EHS software helps document and prioritize goals and identify timeframes for completion. It can help you track progress towards your goals to indicate if more ambitious actions are needed to meet them or you need to reevaluate your strategy.
To effectively manage environmental aspects, companies need to develop a strategy, which can be created in EHS software. Many EHS platforms have the functionality to create action items associated with specific aspects. Users can provide details on the action, assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and keep track of progress. Creating tasks and assigning corrective actions allows company management to implement solutions. Company management can identify controls to implement and create corrective actions when certain aspects occur. Using a software tool helps integrate your EMS into broader business operations and ensures completion of mitigation and preventative measures by the responsible personnel.
Regulatory compliance is a major component of an environmental management strategy as noncompliance can result in severe repercussions, both legal and with your company’s reputation and ability to do business. Many environmental topics such as air, water, and waste have regulatory and permit requirements to properly manage. Keeping track of requirements such as thresholds, authorized activities, monitoring, reporting, and recordkeeping can be difficult. EHS software can help manage these by creating tasks based on the requirements, collect and record data, prepare reports, and indicate if certain thresholds are exceeded.
Another important element for effective environmental management is collecting data. Data can include metrics to track performance on various environmental topics and information needed for regulatory reporting, incident tracking, and completion of corrective actions. EHS platforms are a great way to simplify data collection as they enable multiple users to input data and have built in analytical capabilities. It takes away some of the errors associated with manually collecting, consolidating, and analyzing data to provide more accurate results. Some platforms have the ability to automatically track and pull in data from other systems, further reducing errors and simplifying the process. Data is necessary to make good decisions and determine the effectiveness of a strategy or action item.
Some aspects that are identified may occur as a result of an accident, such as an oil spill or accidental release of hazardous materials to wastewater. When this happens, having established incident reporting and response procedures is critical for remedying the incident. EHS software can allow personnel to report and provide details on the incident. Based on the severity of the incident, corrective actions can be assigned to ensure the incident is addressed and actions are implemented to prevent it in the future. Platforms can help track remediation progress completion and escalate the issue to the necessary personnel. In some cases, accidents need to be reported to regulatory agencies and EHS software can help create these notifications using the information provided in the incident report.
To make any program work, employees must be trained on the purpose of implementation and on any responsibilities they must carry out. Employees should be educated in the environmental topics they are exposed to in their role, as well as how to properly manage them. EHS software offers a solution to providing online training and schedule in-person trainings. It also gives management oversight on employee completion to ensure they are up-to-date with required trainings. Educating employees helps reduce the number of incidents and provides information on how to implement actions that are part of an organization’s EMS.
To ensure your organization is implementing your environmental management strategy correctly, conducting audits and inspections is a great way to review your program. Audits and inspections facilitate on-site data capture to review whether any improvement actions are being implemented and if they are effective. EHS software can help conduct these reviews with checklists and question sets that guide employees through their assessment. It can help gather the necessary information to evaluate the effectiveness of environmental management initiatives and establish corrective actions where there are gaps in compliance.
EHS Insight is a comprehensive software solution with the capabilities to support your environmental management program. Our customizable forms allow you to tailor information gathering and task management to meet your needs.
Our Environmental Aspects & Impacts module allows you to identify and categorize activities, aspects, and impacts and assess their significance. Information on any regulatory requirements can be added. Any controls needed to mitigate negative impacts can be identified and users can schedule reviews for issues that need to be more frequently monitored.
To create goals and create strategies to meet them, our Objectives module can help. For the aspects identified, users can add objectives that correspond to mitigating negatives impacts and expanding positive ones. For each objective, any action needed to meet the goal can be added along with deadlines and a responsible person or group. Completion progress can be tracked, and the action can be escalated if not completed.
Many tasks associated with environmental management and ISO 14001 certification are reoccurring and need to be completed at multiple locations. Our Compliance Management module assists with scheduling these tasks and ensuring completion. With this module, tasks such as monitoring, data collection, inspections, permit renewals, and maintenance can be scheduled for the appropriate location, person, or role within the organization. Customized email notifications and reminders can be sent to the appropriate personnel and to ensure completion, tasks can be escalated to other responsible parties.
To conduct audits and inspections, our Audit Management module can be leveraged to ensure continuous improvement of your EMS. Customized question sets provide questions and checklists to complete as employees or contractors conduct their audit or inspection. Based on the company's needs, question sets can be customized to include features like points, signatures, and email notifications to designated individuals when an audit is completed. For more complex questions that may need additional clarification, guidelines can be added directly to specific questions to help the auditor understand them better or provide relevant context. The mobile applications allow users to complete the forms while in the field, even without Wi-Fi access.
Reach out to EHS Insight today for more information on how our platform can help support your environment management system.
1 ISO 14001: 2015 Environmental management systems — Requirements with guidance for use, International Organization for Standardization, 2015