Environmental Management Plans Demystified

A Guide to ISO14001

Stephen Tinsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415246644
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134540853
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Business

The development of an environmental management plan is an essential business activity that helps organise, direct and control operational activities, and plan for future environmental risk. Once created, an environmental management plan is an ongoing asset that requires regular updating and enables benchmarking against company targets and competitors.
Environmental Management Plans Demystified takes you step-by-step through the process and procedures required to implement a successful plan. Its clear, accessible style allows you to achieve ISO 14001 compliance with the minimum of effort. Examples of standard documentation, case studies, flowcharts, and checklists are included, as well as useful hints to avoid resource-wasting pitfalls.
If you want to install a successful environmental management plan that will minimise environmental risk and create a competitive advantage for your company, this book is an essential practical guide for both the absolute beginner and the experienced practitioner.

1 Introduction

For most companies, the business management dynamic is changing. Because of the increasing risk of environmental legislative penalties, the role of environmental management is becoming increasingly important. To be successful, businesses have to follow the environmental management concept and develop product and service offerings that satisfy the environmental needs and wants of consumers more effectively than competitors. Environmental management is a complex task, which incorporates many interrelating parts that interface with consumers, the market place and the actions of competitors. Every company needs an environmental management plan to help examine environmental risk and to ensure that a successful environmental management system is installed to minimise this risk and to create a competitive advantage.

Writing an environmental management plan can be a difficult and timeconsuming task if carried out without thought. This book has been written and designed to take the pain out of writing a plan for the implementation of your environmental management system. There are many environmental publications and software packages available today that claim to help and to guide you through the process of writing your environmental management plan. Most of these, however, cloud the issue by trying to dictate rather than to guide. They also assume that future economic, business and environmental trends are known. Although it is important that you take a strategic approach to writing an environmental management plan, it must be flexible enough to react to and exploit new information when it is required. You know your business and products, your customers, your competitors, the business environment in which you operate, and your environmental management objectives. All you want to know is how to write a good environmental management plan; this book will help you to do that.

The book has been written with two main assumptions in mind. The first assumption is that your business is small to medium sized. However, the content of the book will still prove useful if you work within a large business because many departments of larger companies are run like autonomous small businesses and the same principles would still apply. Second, the explanations or worked examples given are based on the assumption that ISO 14001 is the environmental standard being sought. For those who are not pursuing the ISO 14001 standard, following this book will ensure that implementing lesser environmental management systems will be achieved with ease.

Finally, a good environmental management plan should always include some degree of originality and ingenuity. Therefore, when devising your environmental management plan, you should inject some of your own personality. You may have to convince more senior colleagues or colleagues in other roles or in other departments (for example production managers or sales managers) that your environmental management plan is going to benefit the whole company. It will be you, your knowledge, your experience and your ideas that will capture the interest and imagination of the reader.

Environmental management centres on limiting environmental risk

Current environmental management concentrates on minimising environmental problems. As you will very quickly discover, however, environmental management is really about taking a group of people and setting them new objectives to make the company more efficient and effective. This may take the form of improved operating efficiency or the creation of new product or market opportunities.

The introduction of anything new generally brings its own set of new demands. These new demands require traditional scarce resources, such as time and money, to resolve them. Therefore, environmental management begins with the identification of the environmental factors that affect, or may affect, your business and the prioritisation of those factors to be addressed along with the available resources. You can make environmental management as simple as you want: from writing straightforward procedures for the collection and separation of office paper and plastic to the full-blown manuals and procedural requirements of the international environmental standard ISO 14001.

Let us think for a minute about introducing environmental management into a company. Most managers will have little or no understanding of the concept. They would consider that it does not affect their job or department and that, if it must be introduced, it is someone else’s responsibility. To put this into context, focus on the function of the production manager. Production managers do not manage the environment. They manage production all day long, and if they have a stoppage they use, together with a number of well-practised expletives, a portion of their scarce resources to get production moving again. It is quite obvious that the production manager has one overriding objective – to maintain production levels. In most current company cultures, it is unlikely that the environmental issues relating to production activities would achieve even second place on the production manager’s list of daily priorities.

From the environmental manager’s perspective, the stoppage, or the fixing of the stoppage, may itself have created an environmental issue that might have to be addressed. The environmental manager’s resources are also scarce, and resolving an issue in production may leave little or no resources for resolving an issue, for example, in stores. However, environmental management is not about resolving issues as they occur. It would be a bit like the little Dutch boy putting his fingers in the dam to stop the water coming through. The environmental manager, like the little Dutch boy, has limited resources at his disposal (Figure 1.1). You will find that, to be effective, environmental management works better as a system, i.e. it must become part of the whole company’s considered business procedures and practices. A simple environmental unit ‘bolted on’ to existing business procedures and practices will prove ineffective and may be viewed by other managers as a hindrance. The system approach will eventually lead, with time and a bit of luck, to a new company working culture.

Figure 1.1 The limited resources of the environmental manager.

Types of environmental management systems

It may be useful at this point to provide a brief history of the emergence of environmental management systems. Three formal types of environmental management systems have been developed to date. The first system – BS 7750, introduced in March 1992 – was a British Standard for environmental management systems. It has since been withdrawn and largely superseded by the international environmental management system standard ISO 14001, which was introduced in September 1996. The third system, the Eco-Management and Auditing System (EMAS), was introduced in June 1992 but is different from ISO 14001 in that it applies to industrial companies only, is site specific and environmental performance data are required to be disclosed to the public.

At present, ISO 14001 is the preferred option for most companies seeking a recognised environmental management system because it applies to the whole company and environmental data do not need to be disclosed to the public. Although there may be a significant difference in procedural detail between these two systems, their frameworks are basically similar. Both facilitate environmental improvement through the establishment of targets and objectives. The implementation of operational and management procedures ensures that the objectives and targets are achieved.

If a quality system is already in place, such as ISO 9000, the introduction of ISO 14001 will be relatively straightforward. The only significant difference between the two systems is that ISO 14001 has a legislative compliance requirement. This means that a company must be familiar with, and comply with, the environmental legislation and regulations that apply to its business activities. Conversely, if there is not any kind of quality system, the introduction of ISO 14001 first will greatly reduce the time and effort needed to achieve ISO 9000 accreditation in the future. The two systems, in terms of improving the quality of company operations, are viewed by many assessors as being very close in terms of offering a good framework for operating an environmental or quality system.

The multitasking environmental manager

For environmental management to be successfully introduced into a company, the environmental manager needs to be multitasking. The environmental manager needs to wear, at some point, all the hats of all the managers, or persons, responsible for departments or operating functions of the company (Figure 1.2). He or she needs to be aware of how the finance, production, sales, legal and purchasing departments think and operate. The environmental issues that arise will vary from department to department, but they must all be part of the environmental management system.

From time to time throughout the book, you will see a ‘winking eye’ icon that will signal a hint, a shortcut or a pearl of wisdom from the oyster of experience that may save you some inconvenience when implementing your system. When your system implementation has been completed, you may have developed a few more ‘hints’ of your own that can be passed on.

Figure 1.2 The environmental manager needs to be able to multitask.

Environmental managers are not superheroes and cannot leap tall buildings with a single bound. Environmental management will not solve all of your operational or business problems. Placed on the business development continuum, environmental management can be, at one end, a collection of procedures, techniques and attitudes that introduces awareness and efficiency. At the other end of the continuum, however, it has the potential to increase efficiency significantly, reduce operating costs, improve products and services and generate new market and product opportunities. How far you want to go along this continuum is up to you.

The plans, procedures, examples and case studies used in this book have focused mostly on ISO 14001 because it has been assumed that, at some point in the environmental development, you may find there are commercial needs and legislative, ethical or supply chain pressures to achieve this standard.

Detailed below are a few examples of how environmental management affects other departments and how the environmental manager will need to have an awareness of what goes on so that environmental issues in every department are considered in the environmental plan.

Purchasing

This may seem like an uneventful place to begin to consider what environmental issues may be involved. Not so: everything that comes into your company has to be monitored to ensure that it is not an environmental hazard. For example, every substance, such as glue, paint, solder, aerosol cleaners, polishes, needs to be categorised as hazardous or non-hazardous. Each item can be classified by the manufacturer’s description on the box or by the information sheet enclosed with the item. If you operate a Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) system, then this will already be in place. Those items that are marked as hazardous need to be labelled and securely stored and disposed of, again according to the manufacturer’s recommendations.

Marketing

The marketing department is not slow in these days of spin to jump onto a new sale-generating opportunity. Environmental or ‘green’ marketing is, or can be, a potent weapon if used correctly. Consider for a moment the competitive advantage, particularly with today’s environmentally sensitive public, of a product that is environmentally friendly. Many consumers derive a ‘feel-good factor’ from knowing that once the product has fulfilled its usefulness the packaging and product materials can be recycled and reused. The environmental downside would be the noise pollution created by the constant ringing of the tills as a result of the increased sales!

A close relationship between the marketing manager and the environmental manager allows an exchange of information that can offer additional product benefits, improved company image and increased sales. For example, the environmental manager may suggest the use of different materials to make the product more environmentally friendly, thereby improving the company’s image. The marketing manager must determine whether the product price will increase and whether existing consumers will still purchase the changed product.

Product design

In creating the design of, for example, a new car, a team of individuals from a number of disciplines would have grappled with the design rudiments of style, space, ergonomics, aerodynamics, budget and market demand. New issues such as exhaust emission levels, unleaded petrol and recyclability of materials have led to a requirement for the environmental manager to have an input into the product design process to ensure that environmental improvements are included in the design and are not just a cosmetic afterthought.

Production

An effective environmental management system is an ideal tool with which to monitor the environmental issues involved in changing a product design or installing a new production process. All the environmental implications of production changes need to be mapped, assessed and monitored as part of the new environmental management system.

Public relations

For most companies, good public relations (PR) are everything. Bad PR hurts business. Bad environmental PR is disastrous. Good environmental PR is excellent for business. The environmental manager and the PR manager need a close working relationship to ensure that good environmental developments and endeavours reach a wide audience. A strong environmental public image is a cherished prize – but beware of false promises. Early consumer pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Managing the environment
• 3 Nine steps to a successful environmental management plan
• 4 The environmental audit
• 5 Environmental plan structure
• 6 Monitoring and measuring
• 7 EMS audit and management review
• 8 Preparing environmental operational procedures
• 9 Documentation assistant
• 10 Manuals, folders and logs assistant
• 11 Alternative environmental management systems
• 12 ISO 14001 self-assessment
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Bibliography
• Index