Industrial environmental managers (IEMs) working in manufacturing facility environmental programs are responsible for overall environmental management system (EMS) in a comprehensive, systematic, planned, and documented manner regarding waste minimization or reduction and compliance with environmental regulations and standards. These managers act as stewards of environmental ethics. The IEMs work closely within an environmental management process (EMP) team, including process operation engineers, quality control engineers with a goal of high‐quality manufactured products while optimizing their use of resources and reducing wastes. Their tasks include but are not limited to support training fresh environmental engineers and personnel: safety, sampling, monitoring, analyzing, summarizing, and managing environmental data; preparing various permits for compliance assurance, and reporting of specialized environmental performances information to internal and external stakeholders of the industry. These activities facilitate the EMP team, organizational structure, planning, and resources for developing, implementing, and maintaining policy for environmental protection (Sroufe 2003).
Goals of IEMs
The major goals of IEMs are to continuously increase industry and corporate regulatory compliances and concurrently reduce wastes. Typically, an environmental manager follows a PDCA cycle (Figure 8.25). The diagram shows the process of first developing an environmental policy, planning the environmental management process, and then implementing it. The process also includes checking the system and acting on it. The model process continuously guides improvement through organizational review and revision of the system (ISO 2018b). This is a model that can be used by a wide range of organizations – from manufacturing facilities to service industries to government agencies.
Environmental Compliance and Compliance Assurances
Environmental Compliance and Its Assurances means conforming to environmental laws, regulations, standards, and other requirements such as site permits to operate. In recent years, environmental concerns have led to a significant increase in the number and scope of compliance imperatives across all global regulatory environments. Being closely related, environmental concerns and compliance activities are increasingly being aligned with corporate performance goals and being integrated to some extent to avoid conflicts, wasteful overlaps, and gaps (Tarantino 2008).
Compliance with the above requirements and obligations requires meeting certain conditions. Typically, these include
- developing comprehensive spreadsheets and compliance assurance matrices
- managing monitoring programs or schedules, ensuring that the monitoring required in various permits has been done at the correct locations, for the correct parameters and at the correct frequency
- preprocessing, performing calculations, and validating the data for compliance with any alert or reporting levels
- generating routine compliance reports for state and federal regulatory authorities
The management of the above can be complex and time‐consuming, leading to an increasing uptake of software systems designed to manage environmental compliance. These are often referred to as environmental data management systems. Criteria must be considered when selecting environmental compliance software: proven capability, high performance, transparent, traceable data handling, a robust calculation engine, advanced factor handling, simple integration, automated workflows and quality assurance, and flexible reporting and data extraction.
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