On Tuesday November 5th, KEI hosted CASF’s Environmental Management Systems course on-site. Course participants included representatives from Acadian Group, Coatings 85, Torcad, MacDermid Enthone, and UBA.
The course started out with an overview of key features of an environmental management system (EMS), including:
- An EMS Policy statement that describes the organization’s commitment to protect the environment, prevent pollution, fulfill compliance obligations and continually improve
- An understanding by leadership that the main intent of a management system is to set ourselves up for success – to consistently achieve what’s intended from each of our processes and programs. And when things deviate from what’s intended, we take actions to improve our system
Some key management system success factors discussed in the course include:
- A commitment and understanding by leaders and all staff on how their roles help achieve key goals of the EMS policy,
- An integration of management system risks and opportunities into processes, programs, performance monitoring and decision-making, and
- Resources needed to maintain and continually improve the system are available.
The PDCA cycle of management systems was discussed, where:
- P – PLAN – processes and programs are planned to achieve policy commitments (i.e. environmental protection, pollution prevention, compliance, improvement),
- D – DO – processes and programs are implemented as planned,
- C – CHECK – processes and operating criteria are monitored, measured and reported-on
- A – ACT – actions are taken to continually improve (especially where there are deviations from what’s expected in the preceding PDC steps).
In the course, we practiced using some templates and tools for identifying the organization’s:
- proper set-up of processes and programs, such as using the Ishikawa (fishbone) diagram and an example of a process / program mapping tool (identifying key inputs and outputs for each of the steps),
- interested parties, their needs and expectations (identifying which of these are compliance obligations) and related risks and opportunities,
- environmental aspects and impacts – using an example rating scheme for identifying which of these are significant environmental aspects
- environmental objectives and targets (based on significant environmental aspects, compliance obligations, risks & opportunities)
- communication plan – listing what, when, with whom and how you regularly communicate environmental information to various interested parties
The course also provided an overview of environmental compliance obligations in Ontario, including an overview of key sections of the:
- Canadian Environmental Protection Act
- Fisheries Act
- Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act and regulation
- Environmental Compliance Approvals in Ontario
- Environmental Protection Act and related regulations
- Ontario Water Resources Act
- Clean Water Act
And the final activity of the day involved a review of recent Ontario Court Bulletins – and using key messages from the day’s training – identifying how each of the environmental convictions and fines could have been prevented with an effective environmental management system in place.
For more information on the EMS course, feel free to contact the course instructor Brigitte Roth at [email protected]
