Using environmental aspects to inform investment decisions
Technology really is fantastic, and pretty much all the time now I’m providing my services remotely. Today, whilst standing at my desk, I was with a client just outside Taunton. Part of the day was spent reviewing their Environmental Aspects & Impacts.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terms; environmental aspects are the parts of an organisation’s activities that interact with the environment, and environmental impacts come from a change to the environment resulting from an environmental aspect.
As an example, a worker driving their car to work (the activity) has some potential environmental aspects and related impacts. One potential aspect is emissions to air from the vehicle, with the related environmental impact being depletion of the ozone layer.
The idea with an Aspects and Impacts Register is to list all aspects and related impacts, and to determine those that are most significant to your business. Action then needs to be planned to address (to eliminate or reduce) these significant aspects. That is one of the reasons why Aspects and Impacts should be at the heart of every business…they are designed to inform and drive reductions in the environmental impact of a business, and that normally means saving money.
This particular client in Taunton had a large number of Environmental Permits at their site, and through applying their criteria, each one of these had been classed as a Significant Aspect.
This meant that around 40% of their aspects were classed as significant and had the effect of diluting the benefit that their Aspects Register had. In other words, things like Energy, Waste, Emissions, Discharges to water and land etc., had become ‘lost’. Or put another way, the main (significant) environmental impacts that the organisation was having on the world around them was not immediately apparent.
Best Practice organisations aim to have around 10-15% of their aspects as significant, allowing them to use their resources to target these with the intention to reduce or eliminate them.
ISO14001 gives little guidance, if any, as to how to determine environmental aspects. It is largely up to organisations how they do this, provided it is logical, and they can clearly indicate the process they have used.
Where organisations find that their environmental aspects register produces a ‘cloud’ of significant aspects, it may be worthwhile using alternative criteria to evaluate the aspects.
What is important is that suitable criteria are used such that the organisations highest rated environmental aspects emerge. The top 10-15% should be classed as significant, and, to reduce the organisation’s environmental impact, this is where investment should be made.
Trevor Patterson is the owner of Pattersons Consulting who help organisations across UK & Ireland achieve their Health and Safety, Environmental, Sustainability and Quality goals.
