Environmental Management Systems

Source: Environmental Management Systems: An Implementation Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Organizations (2nd Ed.)

By Philip J. Stapleton et. al.

Synopsis: As the titles suggest, this lays out the foundation for an EMS, including why an organization should have one, i.e. benefits; the key concepts or components; and the planning that goes into it to increase odds of success.

Reflection: This is where the sustainably-harvested, organically-grown latex becomes acquainted with the durable yet permeable recycled road surface. It’s the nuts and bolts of moving an organization towards sustainability. It’s also a big document, 200 pages, so I thought critically about what would be relevant to you, my loyal readers. It has become clear that all our resources are excellent. Maybe it’s because our professor diligently combed the collective of human knowledge to pick out, from the mountains of chaff, only the choicest grains of wheat, or maybe it’s that we’ve got so far to go, even the simplest documents pertaining to the lowest of the low hanging fruit seem like revelations. Ah, I’m sure it’s a little bit of both.

In any case, I have yet to read anything for this class that wasn’t accompanied by at least one Aha Moment and several minutes of daydreaming about how I would wow the CEO and board with a simple yet sophisticated PowerPoint presentation that explained how leveraging our influence over vendors could simultaneously pad our bottom line, halt the swing of the club mere inches from the brow of the adorable baby seal, and convince McDonalds to become the most powerful advocate for local and sustainable food, thus launching me, personally, onto the cover of this month’s “Savior Magazine.” A guy’s gotta dream, right? But again, I digress…

My point in all that self-aggrandizing rambling is that I thought I would give you the highlights from all our materials, so that you might experience some of those same Aha Moments for yourselves. This has turned out to be difficult because, more often than not, the whole document we’re reading is a highlight. Accepting that, I then thought I would offer astute, sometimes scathing criticism of our documents, demonstrating both my deep processing of the material and an intellect superior to that of the authors. Well, it turns out the people writing this stuff are pretty smart, with considerably more knowledge of and experience with sustainable business practices than I. My magazine cover is fading… Again with the digressing.

So I’m still left staring at my keyboard, wondering what to tell you about 200 pages of pretty thorough, often dry, how-to on implementing an EMS. I guess the first is to acknowledge that sustainability is not just about environmental impact, although you could make the argument that it’s never more than a few degrees of separation from it. The second is to recognize how daunting a task this is. There are no less than seventeen sections identified as key elements of an EMS, from taking stock of where you are to goal setting to legal obligations to documentation to management review. Somehow my daydream isn’t as thorough. That thought lead me to the following idea: I’m going to take you into my daydream, so I can share with you how I see this, or something like this, being implemented. You’re happy about this because, let’s face it, you don’t really want to know the details of all those 17 sections. You want to know what a company does with something like this, and how it ultimately benefits you or your family. It’s good for me because talking out my thought processes often reveals questions and inconsistencies that need some more work.

My dream in life, career-wise, is to work for a company in the bicycle industry as a sustainability manager. There are several that are already on the right track and many stops ahead of other businesses on that path to sustainability. One of them is a large parts distributor. I won’t use their name, because they’re considering an application from me at this very moment, and I would rather they discovered my writing talents some time after I’ve signed a contract. This company is fabulous. A few years ago, they expanded and their new building is LEED Gold certified. They used as many recycled and repurposed materials as possible. Their landscaping is sustainable. They have a great bike-to-work incentive program. They pay a livable wage and offer competitive benefits, and they’re making enough money that, in these economic times, they’re expanding again. They get it.

Our resource provides us with a handy flowchart, outlining important elements and the logical order in which they might be addressed. We start with legal requirements, because let’s face it, a young idealist, straight out of grad school, isn’t going to start by changing the laws, and those laws are the rules by which we need to play. In our hypothetical company, there is a lawyer or a team of lawyers. I go to them with this, because as I’ve stated before, my knowledge of the law is exactly as deep as my knowledge of socioanthropology. I find out that, low and behold, we’re already playing by the rules. We just need to keep playing and hope the rules don’t change.

The next step is assessing how our company interacts with the environment. Easy, right? This is one of those intimidating steps if taken as a whole. In reality, we’d break it down and start with the low-hanging fruit. Pick out a product or service that’s pretty close to being where we want it, something that wouldn’t cost a lot of money or require a lot of training to get it to where we want it, and we concentrate on that. Maybe we decide to investigate changing to a soy-based cutting oil in our machine tools.

Our next step is to consider the views of interested stakeholders. We ask the machinists what they think. We talk to the supplier to determine the cost and then we talk to our accountants to find out how that cost will affect our bottom line. This won’t be straightforward. The machinists tell us they’re fine with soy cutting oil, except it doesn’t cool and lubricate as well, which will increase wear on tooling, which again is fine, as long as we promise to sharpen their tools more often so quality doesn’t suffer. Another cost, so it’s back to the accountants, and so on.

At this point, my analogy breaks down, because we wouldn’t just be looking at such a specific issue as cutting oil. Consider that one issue as representative of all the issues you might be considering. Considering all the views, of all the stakeholders, we proceed to the next step, which is the construction of a new environmental policy, or the amendment of an existing one. This is a somewhat vague step, and will be different for every organization, but it will result in a document that is relevant to the organization, the issues it faces, and how both of those things relate to its interactions with the environment.

The next step is to define key roles and responsibilities. Our resources says to start at the top, with senior management and such, but it would again depend on the organization and is closely linked to the next step, which is establishing objectives and targets. How do we measure the impact of switching to soy-based cutting fluid? Do we account for it by calculating its effect on our carbon footprint, on our financial bottom line, some other measure, or a combination of all measures? The process in which we’re engaged will not be effective if we don’t know where we’re headed or how to judge our progress toward that destination, which is a nice segue into the next step, which is to develop a system to take care of the documentation we’re now generating, and to establish some kind of system of corrective actions. As we’ve mentioned previously, this process is not necessarily straightforward, we’re going to make mistakes or unsatisfactory progress, and we need to know how we’re going to react to those outcomes.

Next, we establish operational controls and monitoring processes. In our example, this is pretty straightforward: we’re going to be buying and using different cutting fluid. All we need to do to control that is ensure our buyers are buying it and our machinists are using it, which again leads us to the next steps, define job-specific roles, plan and conduct initial employee awareness, and establish other system-level procedures. All of these are pretty self-explanatory. Make sure the cutting fluid is being used, make sure employees understand why we’ve made the change, and try to figure out other ways the change will affect the business and what action on our part that might require.

The last steps are to train employees, conduct EMS audits, and conduct management reviews. Our example makes employee training something we’ve already dealt with, but in a larger organization, or with more extensive changes, it may need to be something more formalized and structured. Processes and progress are less effective if you’re not trying to measure them, and that’s what the audits and management review are about.

That’s it! We’re saving the world one 55 gallon drum of soy-based cutting fluid at a time! Who knew salvation would be so simple and straightforward? I realized toward the end of my example that it was a very simplistic choice, which didn’t lend itself well to explaining all of the steps. It’s important I point out that in my example, the switch to soy-based cutting fluid is not the EMS, but a part of it. Obviously, the real scenario would be much more complicated, making some of the steps that I glossed over much more important and involved, but the enduring understandings from this document are actually pretty straightforward: involve everybody who matters, establish goals and ways of measuring progress toward them, and recognize that some areas will have to be revisited.