Environmental Compliance is a comprehensive term encompassing a variety of sustainability goals and requiring meeting different legislations to different aspects of the environment. In the US alone, there is the Environment Protection Agency, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Stormwater Clean Water Act to name but a few. Compliance with these acts is not only mandatory but noncompliance can lead to a big drain on resources while also destroying the environment around the site of the accident. In addition to fines, you may also have to serve a jail term. The fine itself can be $2,500 a day a violation, not to mention the losses due to disruption in the operations, attorney fees and loss of business due to reputation damage. If that is not compelling enough a reason to consider environmental compliance, implementing best practices aligning with environmental regulations can not only make your business sustainable but also improve your operational excellence and profitability.
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Environmental Compliance
What is Environmental Compliance?
Environmental Compliance covers a broad range of laws, regulations and standards framed by governments and other regulatory bodies to protect the environment even when businesses continue to manufacture and reach out to several markets. This is to enable organizations to think about the impact they’re leaving on the environment. It reduces pollution, protects wildlife and improves the green cover so that we may bequeath a greener world to posterity while pursuing economic development.
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Why Environmental Compliance?
ComplianceQuest Environment and Sustainability Solution enables an organization to identify aspects and related impacts and assess the potential risk that it exposes the organization to both with and without control measures. It tracks and manages events and seamlessly reports issues to regulatory agencies and can automate and digitally transform your process to help improve sustainability performance.
Benefits of Environmental Compliance
Environmental compliance describes the many ways in which public authorities monitor, promote, and enforce compliance with the regulations to improves the society we live in through enhanced environmental benefits:
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Cost reduction: Non-compliance can prove costly in more ways than one. Apart from the costs in the form of penalties and litigation costs, unsustainable practices can be expensive and take many forms such as waste of resources, environmental remediation and so on. Cost reduction becomes easier when you follow sustainable practices and reduce waste. A robust EHS system can help identify potential areas of improvement.
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Reduced carbon footprint: You can significantly decrease the carbon footprint by adopting sustainable business practices. An automated system improves operational productivity that can also help with optimizing the use of resources.
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Corporate Social Responsibility: EHS provides the method of tracking and reporting emissions to regulatory agencies. With consistent monitoring, sustainability goals are easily tracked and achieved. When your company becomes sustainable, it is automatically going to be beneficial to society. This can enhance your brand image and result in an expanded customer base.
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Business profitability: EHS will reduce the effort in tracking, managing, and reporting while ensuring effective decision-making to reach the goals set by your company. Compliance with regulatory standards results in cost savings, operational efficiency and enhanced brand image to improve profitability.
How do I get into compliance?
Environmental compliance and workplace safety are important for almost all industries. When you are running a business, it is important to understand which of the regulations are applicable to you and complying with the relevant ones for achieving sustainability.
To become compliant, consider the following:
Understanding Laws and Regulations
The laws are different for every geography, size, and nature of business. You must be aware of the environmental legislation that is applicable to your organization.
Automated Workflows
Automating your environment compliance efforts not only makes it easier but also improves the outcomes. ComplianceQuest’s cloud-based EHS solution has a module focused on helping enterprises across sectors meet their sustainability and environment goals automating processes and workflows. From oil and gas companies to healthcare firms – a wide range of companies across industries use our Sustainability and Environment solutions.
Continuous Improvement
EHS management plays a vital role in improving workplace safety and sustainability. It also helps forward-thinking organizations to proactively strive for continuous process improvement while seeking to reduce organizational risk.
Stay Updated
Ensure that you are up to date on regulatory information for all your locations and the requirements that must be met to comply with local laws, regulations and best practices.
Fulfilling Environment Compliance Obligations – Just the First Step or the Last Step? Let’s Find Out!!
How can CQ Environmental Compliance help?
CQ’s Environment and Sustainability solution is designed to help with the following:
- Establish Ambitious Environmental Objectives
- Track Sustainability Metrics
- Identify and document ‘Aspect and Impact’
- Report Spills and Releases
- Permit Management
- Act on Notice of Violation
- Regulatory Content Library for training purposes
Outstanding execution and solution coverage
We implemented this software where I work and have been overall happy with the outcome. After taking a day or two workings to learn the software, you’ll never want to go back to your old ways! There’s also a huge library of training videos provided with the subscription, and an easy to use ticket portal. Moving to CQ HSE was worth the effort and will pay for itself within the year, but what really matters is that we have a fully functional HSE software that can grow and evolve with the business. The mobile features and real-time data capture provides great accessibility to the HSE program for all levels of staff.
What are the key drivers of ensuring Environmental Compliance in your enterprise?
ISO 14001:2015 details all key requirements for an organization to meet environmental compliance requirements, in addition to playing a role in increasing sustainability metrics of the organization. In today’s world, it is important for any company – irrespective of industry, size, and location – to be mindful of the impact of its activities on the environment.
For regulatory and EHS teams, it is important to have a well-documented environmental policy document in place – which serves as a starting point for all decision-making.
The key aspects that need to be considered while preparing this document are:
- Proactively understand various aspects of all business processes and their impact on the environment
- Environment and Sustainability Goals of the company and its potential impact on business and financial performance
- Key Metrics related to sustainability goals
- Spills & Releases – in industries like oil & gas
- Permit Management – for tasks that may have a direct impact on the environment
- Notice of Violation – in case certain regulatory requirements are violated and action needs to be taken
- Regulatory Submission Requirements – specific to geography and industry
- ESG Documentation for Annual Report (in case of listed companies)
