Environmental Management

Businesses must recognise and manage the impacts they make on the environment in order to survive in the 21st century.

Reducing your environmental impact, can have financial, organisational and social benefits, an Environmental Management System (EMS) is the perfect solution to assist you - it can provide your company with the foundations to monitor, improve and control your environmental performance.

This management tool can help you to achieve continuous improvement through a "plan, do, check, improve" cycle that can include best management practices and Codes of Practice. It can also be integrated with other management system standards (E.g. Quality, Health and Safety, Information Security etc) to help control diverse management issues.

You can audit the system yourself (1st party audit) or externally (2nd or 3rd party audit) and may be certified to the international ISO 14001standard or to your specific requirements.

An effective EMS will:

• Identify your organisation's personnel's environmental responsibilities
• Recognize circumstances where you are able to reduce waste, including utility use, waste disposal costs and raw materials
• Supporting profitability to reduce costs 
• Reduce the risk of fines for non-compliance with relevant legislation
• Put procedures in place to minimise environmental impact on operations, processes and the wider community 
• Keep statistics on environmental performance against set targets
• Put in place a clear audit trail

An effective EMS may include:

• A full analysis of your businesses activities, products, processes and services that might affect the environment
• Rapid performance and system 'health checks'
• Development of an environmental policy and strategy
• An environmental improvement programme
• Periodic auditing of the system to ensure effective operation
• Internal auditor training and mentoring

How is an EMS different to Quality Assurance (QA)?

EMS differs from QA in that it focuses on controlling the environmental impacts and opportunities of production which is the ‘green’ part, whereas Quality Assurance (QA) focuses on the quality of the end product - the ‘clean’ part.