What is an Environmental Management System (EMS)?
Simple yet effective
An EMS is an environmental management system – a ‘way of doing things’ in your organisation that leads to a reduction in your environmental impacts. It focuses on the causes of your environmental impacts and seeks to put in place simple, but effective ways of managing those causes so that those impacts are reduced or avoided.
Your EMS focuses on the identification and effective management of the causes of your environmental impacts. Doing this improves your environmental performance and can save you money.
The Enviro-Mark programme helps you develop an effective EMS.
How does an EMS work?
For an EMS to be effective it has to be both simple and robust. Simple systems work because the people involved in following them understand what is required. However, if a system is not robust it doesn’t always work and problems can still occur.
A robust EMS has to have the following four components:
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Plan: Identify your environmental problems, work out your legislative compliance, gain commitment for the EMS, get people involved and set out your intentions in a policy statement.
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Do: Manage the problems through procedures, training, signage, changing equipment, and modifying processes.
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Check: Check to see if the ways that you managed your problems are working out. Do audits, monitor activities and check for complaints.
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Change: Understand how your EMS could be improved and take the time to make those changes.
Why a certified EMS?
There is an international standard for what a robust EMS should look like and this is called ISO 14001:2004. There are currently over 150,000 organisations worldwide certified to this standard and it describes the necessary components of a good EMS.
The Enviro-Mark programme takes the requirements of ISO 14001:2004 and breaks the implementation of them down into 5 simple steps: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond.
Having an effective EMS also leads to improvements in your environmental performance, and this will help your organisation become more efficient and more profitable.