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Environmental Management goes back as far as the Industrial Revolution, when factories spewed out waste streams into the water, air, and land.
At the time, the belief was that the land, air, and water were self-healing over time… which we now know to be untrue.
Interestingly, Wikipedia does not have an entry for “environmental management”; by typing this in the search bar, environmental resource management comes up. If you look for “environmental management system”, you’ll see the following:
Environmental management system (EMS)
refers to the management of an organization’s environmental programs in a comprehensive, systematic, planned and documented manner. It includes the organizational structure, planning and resources for developing, implementing and maintaining policy for environmental protection.
More formally, EMS is “a system and database which integrates procedures and processes for training of personnel, monitoring, summarizing, and reporting of specialized environmental performance information to internal and external stakeholders of a firm.”[1]
In modern times, Environmental Management Systems are put in place in order to ensure that an organization considers environmental aspects, and their impacts, when delivering a product or service. Objectives and targets are set based on these impacts, with the organization working to reduce or eliminate negative environmental impacts as a result of their operations.
McDonald Consulting Group has worked with EMS systems for hundreds of organizations, and can help you identify our aspects and impacts, and implement a strong EMS.