What is an Environmental Aspects and Impacts Register?

Developing an environmental aspects and impacts register is key to ensuring the effectiveness of your Environmental Management System for ISO 14001 and a requirement of the Standard.  But you may ask, what are my environmental aspects and impacts?

What are environmental aspects and impacts?

Put simply, environmental aspects and impacts are causes and effects:

• Aspect – An element of your business activities, products or services that interacts with the environment
• Impact - Any change to the environment, either adverse or beneficial, as a whole or partial result of an aspect/s

In a nutshell, an aspect is something you do that affects the environment. Whereas an impact is the effect it causes.

How do I identify my environmental aspects?

The first steps towards an environmental aspects and impacts register are identifying your environmental aspects. So, get the ball rolling by listing all your activities, including:

• Day to day activities
• Annual activities
• Irregular activities
• Out of the ordinary and emergency situations, e.g. emissions from transportation might happen all the time, but a diesel spillage only happens in an emergency.

In an office, the environmental aspects will differ greatly to those of the manufacturing plant.  In an office, the main environmental aspects may include emissions linked to air conditioning, energy consumption and paper usage, in contrast to an industrial site where discharges to water or emissions to air have significant impacts.

Once all the environmental aspects have been identified, you need to consider if you have the ability to control or influence the activity that has caused them.  For example, in a fully serviced office, you may have no control over the waste streams or the recycling facilities, however you can look to reduce the amount of waste produced and through training, monitoring and changes in behaviour find meaningful reductions in the volume of waste produced.

How do I identify my environmental impacts?

The next step is to assess the aspects you have identified and then consider what the impact on the environment might be.   It is best to consider the worst-case scenario as well as the day to day impacts, so that you can put appropriate actions into place to mitigate the risk. 

If we think of a diesel spill, the potential impact on the environment is the diesel enters a watercourse and kills all the wildlife. Whilst this is most unlikely to happen, we need to consider it, similar to how you would in a health and safety risk assessment.

When analysing the environmental impacts, we need to consider the bigger picture too and the lifecycle of the impact.  Let’s use the example of consumption of office consumables (paper, toner, stationery etc).  Our aspect is the consumption of the goods and the impact on the environment could be use of natural resources, deforestation, chemical pollution from production and / or use of fossil fuels.  These are all impacts on the environment, that need to be considered and documented.

Determine the significance of the aspects and impacts

When determining the significance of the aspects and impacts a number of different methods can be used.  It is very subjective and there is no right or wrong way.  The objective of completing the significance rating is to identify where your business has the largest potential of impacting the environment, so that everyone can focus their attention.  From here, we can set objectives that are both relevant to the business and also to the protection of the environment.

It is important that the methodology on how the significance is determined is clearly documented so that we achieve consistent assessments.

I like to approach this in a similar way to a health & safety risk assessment: likelihood and severity.  What is the likelihood of the aspect occurring and how severe will the impact be on the environment? 

Depending on the business, you may want to use a simple low, medium or high rating or you may want to use a scoring system using numbers, for example one through to five.

Once you have applied your significance rating you can look at your controls.

What controls do you have?

Think about controls you have in place to prevent the aspects from occurring and to prevent environmental damage.  This could include training, ensuring procedures are being followed or emergency equipment. 

For example, with paper consumption, you might have the controls such as duplex printing, sustainable purchasing practises of buying recycled paper and the company ethos of not printing when not required. 

Then we can apply our significance rating again after the controls to show an improvement, or you can just show the significant assessment after the controls are in place.  It is important that you rate your aspects so that you can identify the larger risks and how these can be reduced.  Once the significant aspects have been determined, objectives should be agreed so that we can look to reduce these impacts. 

You also need to ensure that the assessment is reviewed on a regular basis, especially if activities have changed or if you have new processes or controls have been put into place.  As you achieve your objectives, the risk will also be reduced, so the assessment will need to be reviewed too.