RESUMO
Managing environmental risk is essential to ensure organisations minimise their impact on the environment, comply with environmental legislation and maintain their reputation in an increasingly environmentally aware society. Organisations frequently use management systems to plan and execute routine environmental assessments, however environmental impacts may still arise from routine activities or accidents that could be avoided by effective environmental management. Currently there is no method for an organisation to assess the level of awareness their employees have of activities that may lead to an environmental impact, or the level of uptake of environmental management processes. Therefore, the Environmental Management Performance Assessment (EMPA) process was developed to enable organisations to self-assess existing environmental management processes by survey of their employees. The EMPA process was aligned to key phases of the Deming Cycle and involves development and distribution of a survey to organisation employees. The responses are then used to recognise areas for improvement by progression through a bespoke flow chart integrated with the initial survey. This enables demonstration of how particular hazards arise from insufficient awareness at different stages in the Deming Cycle and how these hazards can have wider, reputational, economic, and legislative consequences. The process was trialled by surveying academic researchers on the environmental management processes in their laboratories as a sample set.
RESUMO
The environmental risks from explosive manufacturing and testing activities are usually evaluated using a qualitative process such as environmental impact prioritisation as recommended by legislation and guidance. However, standard environmental management system (EMS) guidance rarely provides detailed information on how to objectively assess the significance of the environmental impacts based on a rational scientific evidence. Quantitative exposure and eco-toxicity assessments are frequently used in combination with environmental threshold limit guidelines, but these omit important environmental impacts such as physical damage to land, nuisance and contribution to climate change. These impacts are particularly relevant to the explosives industry where noise nuisance and physical damage are given high priority. In addition, contamination from explosive compositions may comprise mixtures of multiple legacy and new generation explosives such as 1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazinane (RDX), 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT), 5-nitro-1,2,4-triazol-3-one (NTO), 2,4-dinitroanisole (DNAN) and nitroguandine (NQ), which may have combined impacts not captured by conventional eco-toxicity assessments. Further, threshold limits for energetic materials in soil and water have not been established for most nations. Additionally, in the explosive industry wider concerns such as legislative compliance and stakeholder concerns may help to provide a more broadly applicable assessment of environmental impact. Therefore in this study a novel decision framework was developed to integrate empirical data with business risks to enable rational decision making for the environmental management of explosive manufacturing facilities. The application of the framework was illustrated using three case studies from the explosive manufacturing industry to demonstrate how the framework can be used to justify environmental management decision making. By linking the environmental impacts to business risks, we demonstrate that manufacturers are able to assess a wide spectrum of issues that might not be identified in the initial environmental assessment such as non-toxic pollution incidents, breaches in legislation and stakeholder perceptions.
