ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS

Each part of your organisation needs to be broken down into activities - for example sales, printing, binding, distribution. For each seperate activity draw a flow chart showing what takes place in the activity from start to finish - these are the aspects of that activity. This will help you to identify what resources go in to the activity, how it is carried out, and what the end products, emissions and wastes are.

IN - ON - OUT flow chart example (to come from Craig for printing machine)

Once you have a comprehensive overview of all the aspects of an activity you will determine which aspects are those which are the most significant - that is those that do, are have the potential to, impact upon the environment. These significant aspects may become priorities for action in your environmental management system.

Significance is determined using a procedure for environmental risk assessment. This procedure must have a robust and consistent methodology for scoring aspects of your activities. You will use the same procedure to carry out significance ratings for all activities across your organisation.