Environmental Management System

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Hi, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. This week I'm going to go through what an environmental management system is and how you can manage your environmental impact and what sort of steps you can take to manage your organization's environmental impact. It's going to be fairly free and easy. I This is going to be the end of season 1. I've really, really enjoyed interviewing so many cool people over the last 12 months. I've interviewed 52 people, I've just realized, because we have done a full year. That's awesome. So we— I mean, it's been fascinating listening to people, talking to people, and understanding what it is that drives organizations and obviously people to be more sustainable. Whether you're a B Corp, whether you are not a B Corp, whether you are a small cafe like one of the most recent episodes, they're doing so much in their local community. And it's people like them, and it's people that we have been listening to that are really driving the sustainability agenda further forwards. It's an exciting time to live. I know we're seeing a lot of doom and gloom, but actually, if we all work together, which I think, and you can see that we are starting to, then the world is a bright place. You can do your part, and that's the reason why I'm going to go through how to environmentalize your business. So what is an environmental management system? It's basically a tool that enables organisations to reduce their environmental impact and increase operating efficiency. It's a systematic framework that manages the immediate and long-term environmental impacts of an organisation. This could include your products, your services, and processes that occur at any point Within that business or organization. Using an environmental management system, a company can measure and evaluate its performance methodologically and in a cost-efficient manner. You can see I'm doing this live. What will it actually do for you? You know, it will give you a structure to measure and report on your reductions. We at Green Element have signed up and had our targets verified by the Science Based Targets initiative, which is a global initiative that is helping enable the whole world to align themselves to one target, and that's that 1.5-degree target. It enables you to review the organization's environmental goals. You can analyze environmental impacts. And of course, you have to adhere to legal requirements. I mean, we're lucky in the UK, and some people would probably say unlucky, but if I'm being honest, who cares? Because we in the UK are definitely one of the most progressive Countries in the world, we have a lot of environmental legislation. And yes, some of it I would say is not the best thought out and could be put in better by the powers to be. But the actual crux of that legislation is actually very good, and. is really beneficial to the environment if it's done properly. Once you've set your targets and objectives, you need to establish a programme to meet these objectives and targets. And then of course you need to monitor and measure the progress in achieving these targets and objectives. Ensuring employees' environmental awareness and competence, so communicating that message, helping them understand what it is that you're doing and how you're doing it. That's the only way that you as an organisation are going to be able to help reduce that environmental impact, and that environmental management system gives you a process on how to minimise those environmental impacts. So, I hear you ask, how does it do that? Well, funny you should say that, it's the Plan-Do-Check-Act model. It's basically a 4-stage problem-solving model that helps an organisation continually improve. You plan it, you do it, you check it, you act it. And you go back to the beginning. It's a constant feedback loop on improvements. So if you are to plan on reducing your environmental impact for your organisation, you need to find out what your environmental impacts are. You need to create a working list of environmental impacts from your organisation and then rank those impacts. You need to work out which ones you should be trying to reduce the most and first. You need to start collecting relevant data and ascertain the problem's root cause. So then you move on to do. You've got this great plan, you've developed it, you've got the right people in place. This is really exciting. It's gonna, it's gonna be great. You can develop and implement a solution. So that's where targets and objectives would be set.

You can—

you need a structure for this to be put in place for your targets and objectives. It is best to make an informed decision from the data available. We suggest looking at current impacts and forecasting a realistic change in terms of percentage, deadline, and action. It is easy to make large declarations but could be hard to deliver on them. The goal is to help your company transition to a more sustainable-driven model, which is why your organization will need to have its right key performance indicators. These are goals that you— that are needed in order to measure the success at later stages. In the early stages of implementing your environmental management system, your company can decide upon a measurement and gauge its effectiveness going forwards. This will obviously change as your journey matures. So check. Now that the changes are underway, it is important to confirm the results through before and after comparison. This is the best time to conduct internal audits to make sure you have all the required paperwork and resources and that tasks are being carried out as planned in the earlier stages. And finally, act. It is the last stage in this 4-step process. Your company should document the results of the environmental management system Have a management review, i.e., talk to senior management because they are behind this and this won't— this will not work if they're not. They need to decide upon its effectiveness and change things if necessary. From this, you can inform others about process changes and make recommendations for the problem to be addressed in the next plan-do-check. Act cycle. So what sort of timeline do you have for a project like this? Well, in month 1, you'd start to plan out your strategy, you'd start to data gather and create your environmental impact. In month 2, you'd set your goals and objectives. You'd start doing and completing staff training, and you'd define the roles and responsibilities of who is involved in your environmental management system. In month 3, we'd expect to take action and implement changes. Within the company. We'd then expect you to gather required documentation, i.e., creating a communication strategy, create an environmental policy, if need be, create an emergency response procedure. In order for you not to, I don't know, leak oil into a river or make sure that your waste stays in one place. Updating your legal compliance register and of course updating the website with the CSR plans. In month 6, we'd expect you to do an internal audit. So assessing where you are and what you're doing and how you're doing it, ensuring that you're doing everything correctly and making sure that, you know, you almost certainly will be able to do a better job. So you'd correct any issues that are highlighted by that audit. In month 7, that would be where you would be talking to your senior management, taking everything that you've learned in your journey And bringing it to senior management so that therefore they can review it and understand what it is that you're doing and where you can do better. And if you were to be going for certification, it's at this point that you would bring an external certification body in. So people like Advanced Certification or BSI are all UCAS accredited. And it's them that would certify that your standard and your environmental management system and formalize it into ISO 14001. So I've just mentioned ISO 14001. It's the first time I've mentioned it in this because really you're greening up your organization. ISO 14001 is an international standard with its main measure is of the success of implementing an environmental management system within your company in order for you to show your green credentials. So why, why would you go for ISO? As well as giving companies a goal to work to, the ISO standards help regulate the processes and measures in order to ensure best practice and to provide an accurate and widely used system of measurements. This gives companies from around the world the opportunity to compare their findings in an easy and reliable way. ISO 14001:2015 is the international standard that specifies requirements for an effective environmental management system. This standard sets out a framework for an environmental management system that your organisation can follow rather than having to create your own. It's divided into 10 sections. It provides a detailed policy for every size of the company so that it can be used by any company ranging from nuclear power plants to local confectionery stands. Environmental standards have been used and updated regularly since 1992. This particular standard was last agreed upon in 2015, hence ISO 14001:2015. I really hope that this has been useful for you and that it lets you avoid some of the common mistakes around the subjects of certifications and environmental management systems. One of the biggest obstacles in setting up an environmental management system is the lack of clarity. We are here to help clear up any of that confusion and help you make positive changes within your organisation. If you've got any questions, please don't hesitate to call us on 020 7096 0054. We will talk you through what it is you need to do. We're happy to complete a free consultation. If you'd like to download a copy of what we call an environmental management system handbook, then please go to podcast 2019 handbook. Of course, it's greenelement.co.uk.

/podcast/2019handbook.

This handbook will help you understand how you can environmentalize your business, and it sets out more pictorially and probably better on a PDF of what I've just been taking you through today. I want to take this opportunity to thank you very much for listening to this podcast. As I said at the beginning, this is the end of season 1. I've really enjoyed speaking to everyone, and it's been an amazing journey. And you know what? I was fired up when I first started doing this podcast, and now I've listened to so many fantastic individuals, my word, am I fired up. And we have got some brilliant podcasts coming up. In the future. We're still recording them and we're still going through them, so, well, here's to the future, eh? Thank you very much for listening.