Environmental Management System

• The environmental policy has to be defined by top management
• The environmental policy must be made available to the public
• The environmental policy must be facility/company specific and incorporate the following:
  • Pollution Prevention
  • Compliance with Legal and Other Requirements
  • Continual Improvement.

• Develop...

If you are not motivated by the thought of saving thousands of dollars in operating costs, raw material costs and waste disposal costs as a result of obtaining ISO 14001 certification of your environmental management system then you might be interested in some of the other benefits. These include:

• Good public relations - the facility’s image with the public, regulatory agencies, lenders, and investors will be enhanced
• Improvement in environmental performance - the facility will experience...

There is no denying that attaining ISO 14001 certification of your environmental management system (EMS) requires financial resources. However, once a facility is certified, there is an opportunity to recoup some of the money spent in attaining the certification. One of the underlying principles of ISO 14001 is to create a program that if implemented will show continual improvement. This continual improvement is achieved and measured as part of the implementation of the EMS by evaluating on a...

It’s kind of strange listing an EMS document as one of the musts to successfully obtain ISO 14001 certification of an environmental management system (EMS) when the ISO14001 standard doesn’t actually require an EMS manual to be developed. Sure there is the requirement to develop documentation as part of your ISO 14001 program (quite a lot of documentation in fact), but there is actually no requirement to develop an EMS manual. So why develop one?   The same reason we document all sorts of things...

There is no getting around the fact that obtaining ISO 14001 certification of your environmental management system will require a commitment of financial and personnel resources. Financial resources will be required for items such as external training classes, consulting support, retaining a registrar to perform the registration audit and periodic surveillance audits to maintain the certification, and miscellaneous support items including signage, communication devices, office supplies, etc....

Four of the most important items needed to obtain ISO 14001 Environmental Management System certification are:

• A driver (a reason for obtaining the certification)
• A commitment of financial and personnel resources
• An gap analysis (initial  audit) of your existing ISO 14001 EMS
• An Environmental Management System document.

A company that is considering pursuing ISO 14001 certification should initially determine what is driving their decision. Who cares if there’s a reason to obtain...

Is your facility prepared to maintain its environmental compliance throughout the year?  Many manufacturing companies are struggling with ways to cost costs while still producing a high quality product and meeting the needs of their employees. One area that tends to be continually looked at from a cost-savings perspective is environmental, health and safety (EH&S). Often times, it is common for facilities to cut EH&S costs to save on overall operating expenses with the hope they will not be...

A reprint of one of our popular articles:

Hazardous material regulations are often found to be confusing and dense, and in our experience people often are not even clear on the delineation between a hazardous material and a hazardous waste. In response to the frequent questions we receive on this topic we have prepared a brief primer on hazardous materials management.

First, a few key words need to be defined:

• Solid Waste - any discarded material that is (1) abandoned, (2) recycled, burned to...

Having just attended the 2011 National Safety Council's Congress and Expo in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone about the IS0 Occupational Health and Safety Management System standard (OHSAS) (ISO 18001).  ISO 18001 was introducted in 2007 and can be applied to any facility that wishes to:

• Establish an OH&S management system to eliminate or minimize risk to employees and other interested parties who may be exposed to OH&S risks associated with...

During the last 11 years, August Mack’s eCAP^® program (Compliance Assurance Program) has expanded and grown from a regional initiative to a national program that has served more than 100 facilities. The genesis of the program began in 1999 and the natural evolution has seen the eCAP program morph into a fully functional sustainable Environmental Management System (EMS), currently approved as a Supplemental Environmental Program (SEP). Applying a tad of revisionist history we might be inclined to...

Blog from the August Mack newsletter article archive:

What is MSECA?
The Midwestern States Environmental Consultants Association (MSECA) was founded in Indianapolis, Indiana in 2009 as a technical association focusing on site characterization, remediation and closure. MSECA’s mission includes two specific components: 1) educating the membership and 2) providing technical assistance to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) during development of policy and guidance.

MSECA...

• Personnel...

Look around, everything we do today is done electronically. In the eWorld, we can find the answer to almost every question in minutes rather than hours, days or weeks. However, with all of this information available at our fingertips it is becoming harder and harder to discern what information is valuable and what information is not. This task is even more cumbersome for those individuals responsible for managing environmental, health and safety (EH&S) functions for their company because these...

During the last ten years, August Mack’s eCAP® program (Compliance Assurance Program) has expanded and grown from a regional initiative to a national program that has served more than 100 facilities. The genesis of the program began in 1998 and the natural evolution has seen the eCAP program morph into a fully functional sustainable Environmental Management System (EMS), currently approved as a Supplemental Environmental Program (SEP). Applying a tad of revisionist history we might be...