- Reduce costs – direct, long-term savings
- Improved efficiency – doing more with less by reducing waste
- Competitive advantage – environmental quality standards to help you win customers
- Legal compliance – keep up to date and avoid fines
- Enhanced Image – demonstrate your commitment to the environment
- Minimise risk – reduce risk from environmental hazards
- Motivated staff – helping improve overall resource efficiency
Managing the environmental performance of your business can be a complex and difficult task. It is not always easy to find the time and resources required to address environmental concerns properly.
An Environmental Management System (EMS) provides a simple and comprehensive approach to managing your environmental performance. Using an Environmental Management System is a best practice approach and can save you money and reduce your environmental impact.
To implement an EMS, you will usually go through the following process:
How to Implement an EMS |
Why are you doing this? |
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An environment policy sets out the key objectives of implementing an Environment Management System (EMS) and communicates commitment to stakeholders. For members of staff to take the EMS seriously it is important to secure commitment from top-level management who should approve resources beforehand. |
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Environmental impacts occur when your organisation’s activities, products or services cause a change in the environment. These impacts should be identified to assess your current situation and form a basis of comparison with future progress. This enables monitoring of environmental performance so that evidence of improvement can be shown to stakeholders. |
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Having identified your environmental impacts, it is important to prioritise these in order of risk and/or expenditure. From this exercise, the areas which have the largest environmental impact will be evident and should be targeted. |
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Developing and following an action plan gives your organisation direction and concrete goals to aim towards, this will ensure success. |
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Will give an indication of how well your organisation is progressing and will demonstrate continual improvement to stakeholders. |
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Achieving an environmental standard ensures that you are following best-practice in running your EMS and demonstrates to stakeholders your commitment and progress in reducing your environmental impact. |
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At the end of this process you will have the following key documents that can be used as the basis for an accredited EMS and can be used as evidence of your environmental commitment and achievements:
- An environmental policy
- A baseline review
- Register of environmental aspects and impacts
- Register of environmental legislation
- An environmental action plan
- Monitoring information on key environmental impacts
Wherever you are on the environmental management ladder, we can support you by providing your organisation with expert advice and support through one of our range of services.
For templates and guidance for EMS visit our Downloads section.
To discuss environmental management and how it can benefit you, contact us.