Environmental management system - helps you to stay on top of quantities and costs
What is an environmental management system?
An environmental management system allows companies and organizations to organize and integrate environmental work by documenting work processes and environmental goals. It can be seen as a company's proof of the continuous work carried out to minimize the environmental impact that the business has on its surroundings. Furthermore, it can provide a holistic perspective that makes it easier to identify the company's aspects that have the most significant environmental impact. Thus, it can offer an opportunity to focus on improving precisely these areas more easily. What such a system looks like, on the other hand, differs depending on the type of business being conducted and whether there is any specific requirement for a particular management system to be implemented. What permeates all methods is that they should contribute to a constant improvement process that can be seen as a life cycle in a company's environmental work. The life cycle consists of first planning of the environmental work, the implementation of the environmental work, then evaluation and review of what has been carried out, and finally improvement of the environmental work. The life cycle is then restarted with new planning, implementation, control, and progress.
More about EMAS
The most common environmental management systems follow ISO 14001 and EMAS, where EMAS is an EU regulation that places almost the exact requirements on a management system as ISO 14001. To be EMAS-registered, a company or organization must have an environmental report that an independent auditor has audited. Common to these two systems is voluntary for companies and organizations to implement.
The purpose of establishing an environmental management system
The primary purpose of introducing an environmental management system should thus be that the company wants to reduce the environmental impact the business has on its surroundings. Therefore, such a management system should contain information on how the industry can remedy negative environmental aspects and how the work should be improved. It should also shed light on essential areas in which the business affects the environment and tell how the company or organization complies with current environmental legislation. It can also be competitively reasonable to appear as a company that engages in environmental issues and profiles itself as a company that runs a sustainable business. A challenge in this is often to find a way that is both sustainable and at the same time cost-effective for the business.