Aspects and Impacts and Essex

After an exciting week in Scotland I am now spending an exciting week in Essex. I love the peripatetic life but I struggle to keep up with the news, my life and the blog. I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning looking to see if there was any interesting environmental news to pass on but it's all massive oil spill and worrying associated effects so instead I offer this simple introduction to aspects and impacts that I put together in an e-mail yesterday.

At the moment I am putting together an aspect register for your organisation. You may not have come across this before so I'll just explain briefly. The environmental standard, ISO14001, has two major commitments; to comply with environmental legislation and to prevent pollution. The initial method for dealing with these two commitments is to identify all the legislation that applies to your organisation and all the things that you can do as an organisation that will affect the environment. This is usually done in the form of a legal register and an aspect register.

An aspect is defined as 'an element of an organisation's activities, products or services that can interact with the environment'. The effect of this is an impact, which is defined as 'any change to the environment, whether adverse or beneficial, wholly or partially resulting from an organisation's environmental aspects'.

Or, to put it another way, an aspect is a cause (of pollution) and an impact is the effect (of that pollution)

Or, in yet another way, and aspect is similar to a hazard for health a safety, an impact is similar to an accident, except that some impacts are positive!

The aspect, then, is how ISO14001 identifies and controls the potential for pollution from your organisation. The idea is that if you fully control you aspects there should be no impacts.

To complicate things still further, we try to minimise the number of aspects we identify by grouping them in order to have a finite number of aspects that we can manage. Particularly in a large and complex organisation, you may have the potential for many impacts on the environment but the environment does not care whether the impact of energy consumption comes for employees driving to work in the morning, lighting the building they are working in or removing waste from a site for disposal. Rather than looking at every impact as a separate issue we group all the similar ones together, in this example, as energy consumption.

So, following that rather long-winded explanation, a few examples.

If your activity is heating the building your aspect may be energy consumption and your impact may be use of finite resource and emission of carbon dioxide contributing to climate change.

If your activity is degreasing metal before coating your aspect may be use of solvents and your impact may include emissions of VOCs to air and depletion of ozone layer (if you are still using trichloroethylene). You might also identify an associated aspect of storage of solvents which could include the impact of pollution of groundwater and disposal of hazardous material. Or you could group the two aspects together as management of solvents.

I hope this helps.