Environmental management systems (EMS) and environmental reports

The benefits of an EMS

Setting up and running an environmental management system (EMS) can provide significant benefits across a number of areas of your business.

Key benefits

Running an effective EMS will help you with:

• better regulatory compliance - running an EMS will help ensure your environmental legal responsibilities are met and more easily managed on a day-to-day basis
• more effective use of resources - you will have policies and procedures in place that help you manage waste and resources more effectively and reduce costs
• marketing - running an EMS will help you prove your business' credentials as an environmentally aware operation that has made a commitment to continual environmental improvement
• finance - you may find it easier to raise investment from banks and other financial institutions, which are increasingly keen to see businesses controlling their environmental impact
• increased sales opportunities - large businesses and government departments may only deal with businesses that have an EMS
• lighter regulation - even if an EMS is not a regulatory requirement, by showing your commitment to environmental management, you may benefit through less frequent site visits or reduced fees from environmental regulators
•  An environmental management system (EMS) is similar to other management systems, such as those that manage quality or safety. It assesses your business' strengths and weaknesses, helps you identify and manage significant environmental impacts, saves you money by increasing efficiency, ensures you comply with environmental legislation and provides benchmarks for improvements.
  An EMS can also help you manage your resources, and improves the reliability and credibility of your environmental policy. You can prove to customers that you are committed to meeting your environmental responsibilities by getting your EMS certified, such as through ISO 14001, BS 8555 or the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS).
  Reporting your environmental performance may be a legal requirement or could be undertaken to provide clients and customers with information regarding your credentials.
  

  Environmental management systems (EMS) and environmental reports

  Integrate your EMS with other policies or systems

  When you establish your environmental management system (EMS), it makes sense to consider how you can integrate it into your other systems, such as those dealing with health and safety and quality. For example, measures to control harmful emissions will be part of your day-to-day health and safety procedures and waste minimisation measures will form a part of quality control and operations policies.
  Other areas where you may have policies or systems in place that could be integrated include sustainability, corporate social responsibility and biodiversity.
  If you integrate the measures from your EMS into other policies and procedures, it will help staff to understand and work with them more easily. However, you need to be sure that the new requirements arising from the EMS are clearly communicated to ensure they are followed.
  It's a good idea to hold some training and awareness exercises with revised documentation to make sure the message gets across.
  If you intend to get your EMS certified, you will still need to manage it separately to ensure you can show you meet requirements specific to the EMS, but this distinction can be handled at a management level rather than risking confusion among staff by issuing another set of policies and procedures.
  
  
  

  Set the baseline

  The process of setting up an EMS starts with a baseline assessment of where your business stands now, in terms of environmental management. Key areas to examine include:
  
• the environmental impact of your business' products and services - both good and bad
• an environmental history of the business - if you have environmental records available
• environmental legislation relevant to your business and whether your operations comply
• current and future risks.

You could benchmark your business' environmental performance against similar operations to assess where you stand. It's essential to analyse all your business processes, stage by stage, to uncover where strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are posed to good environmental management. To get a clear picture of any risks, you should look at all your business activities and their potential environmental impacts. Once you have identified your environmental impacts you need to work out which are significant and so need managing. Identifying the significant environmental impacts is very important because the rest of the EMS relies on it.

Comply with legal and other requirements

The cornerstone of your EMS is identifying the environmental legislation that applies to your day-to-day activities, and making sure that you comply.
Your business may also be subject to other requirements. These may include:

• codes of practice
• trade association and industry initiatives
• other relevant local, regional, national and international initiatives
• site and corporate environmental policies
• relevant parts of your quality and health and safety policies.

Meeting legal and other requirements

Once you have identified the legislation and regulations you must comply with, you need to work through them one-by-one to see how well your business is performing.

 Scheduling and managing reviews
By establishing clear internal auditing systems you can ensure that the measures contained in your policy are being implemented on a day-to-day basis. There are no specific rules you must follow, but you need to have in place:

• procedures that monitor the overall effectiveness of your EMS
• mechanisms that keep an eye on your targets and objectives
• clear definitions of reporting and management responsibilities
• regularly scheduled reviews of the procedures and practices that underpin your EMS.

To ensure these are being carried out effectively, you must have commitment from your management team.
It's also sensible to incorporate your EMS into your other management processes, such as health and safety and quality control. It makes day-to-day management easier and helps communicate your policies to staff. See the page in this guideline: Integrate your EMS with other policies or systems.

How to produce environmental reports

Stand-alone environmental reporting, as a one-off exercise isolated from your other activities, is unlikely to be successful. Environmental reporting will work best based on information from your environmental management system. This provides a mechanism for you to make improvements based on the figures produced in your report, and shows your involvement and commitment to collect the data.

The environmental reporting process

To produce an environmental report you should:

1. identify the audience for your report
2. talk to the audience to understand their concerns and questions
3. identify the internal data you'll need to calculate facts and figures for the report
4. collect the data
5. decide how you're going to publish the report
6. produce and publish the report
7. obtain feedback and review the impact of the report
8. make improvements.