What Does an Environmental Management System Involve and What Are Its Benefits?

This article explains the key components of an Environmental Management System (EMS) and how it can benefit businesses.

Setting up an Environmental Management System (EMS) has become a necessity for businesses today because of growing environmental concerns like global warming, air pollution, and soil contamination. These are creating havoc not only on natural resources but also on the lives of humans and other living things. When each business starts to manage the environmental impacts on an individual level, it can result in an overall reduction of the environmental issues and can pave the way to a better planet. Managing environmental impacts is easier and more effective for businesses if they implement an ISO 14001 environmental management system. Having such a highly standardized management system not only helps to implement best practices to prevent impacts, but it also demonstrates the business’s continual commitment to environmental preservation and protection. However, to assure these, your EMS should be implemented properly involving the following necessary aspects.

Key Components Involving Implementation of an ISO 14001 EMS

An EMS that is implemented according to the ISO 14001 standard should involve the following components.

Initial Assessment

Your organization first needs to do an assessment of your business activities, procured materials or inputs, products, processes, and services that may affect the environment. This initial assessment is necessary for gathering data on your energy uses, wastes generated, resources or raw materials used, and water consumed. It also gives you an idea of the significant impacts of their organization’s activities. Therefore, you can develop an environmental policy encompassing measures for all the identified environmental issues.

Environmental Policy

A properly framed environmental policy is a must and acts as the foundation of the EMS. It not only communicates the measures undertaken to tackle the impacts to members of the organization, but it also reflects how your business acts to preserve the environment. The policy should also include the compliance requirements for the environmental standard, ISO 14001.

Objectives and Targets

For the implementation of the EMS, you also need to set targets for environmental management in your business. Setting specific targets is important as it helps your organization to keep the focus on improving environmental performance. To achieve the targets or objectives, you also should set timeframes and track their progress over time.

Structure and Responsibilities

You should ensure to properly structure the EMS with procedures that are needed to achieve the objectives and prevent the impacts. For that, you need to designate resources to include personnel who will be fully responsible to implement and operate the EMS. Therefore, defining the roles of each employee responsible for managing the environmental performance is essential while you are implementing the EMS.

Internal Auditing and Reviewing

When the EMS is fully operational and is implemented by adhering to the regulations of ISO 14001, you need to do periodic evaluation or auditing to ensure its competence in managing your business’s environmental impacts. Internal auditing is a part of every management system, regardless of the standard, and so it applies to the environmental standard too. With thorough internal audits, you are not only able to know the compliance level of your EMS but also find areas where the EMS needs improvement to better address the impacts. Therefore, auditing and reviewing by management officials identifies areas to improve the EMS, identifies new opportunities, and updates it from time to time to manage the evolving environmental issues.

With all these components fully involved in your EMS, your business can successfully manage its environmental impacts. Running an EMS efficiently can bring the following advantages:

• Resource efficiency leading to cost savings: Of course, a management system that constantly gives a gentle reminder to use resources efficiently will result in cost savings. When the resources are reduced, it also reduces your operating costs. The policy also defines procedures for reducing the amount of waste and managing the wastes.

• Compliance with regulatory requirements: With a standardized EMS, you can become legally compliant with various environmental legislation and reduce the risks of fines or damage to reputation.

• Improves sales opportunity: Your company becomes attractive to many big businesses and public sector organizations for tendering because they only seek to get environmentally sustainable partners.

• Improves stakeholder relationships: Increased awareness for the environment in your organization helps in strengthening the relationships with stakeholders. When they find that your business continuously strives to reduce the environmental footprints, they seek to establish a long-term association.

Bottom Line

Having the ISO 14001 environmental management system can bring enormous benefits to your business besides just regulating and minimizing your impacts. However, to implement the EMS across your organization, you need to keep in mind all the elements to make it fully effective in its purpose. Incorporating all these key elements also ensures that everyone in the organization is involved and has definite responsibilities in operating the EMS.