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Chapter 10
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF A COMPANY, PRODUCTS AND
SITE
10.1 Common Elements of Life Cycle Analysis, Environmental Impact Assessment, and Environmental Audits
The objectives of environmental design and management are to reduce or eliminate a company’s environmental impacts, and therefore a company has to perform some sort of environmental impact analysis or assessment. Environmental impacts can be defined as any change to the environment wholly or partially resulting from an organization's activities, products or services. The environmental impacts have to be traced to and assigned to their source. These sources, such as activities like production, logistics, energy consumption, marketing, or the materials of the product are called the environmental aspects of a company. Only when a company understands its environmental impacts and their relationships to the company’s environmental aspects can it begin to change its environmental performance in a systematic and substantial manner. Analyzing environmental impacts, in other words, provides a company with a baseline of information for changing its practices and periodic audits of its performance. There are three main types of environmental impact assessment.
The first type of environmental impact assessment is life cycle analysis (LCA). It identifies the impacts of a company’s product wherever they occur in a product cycle, from cradle to grave (occasionally to cradle again). The objective of LCA is to identify the impacts so that something can be done about them when the product and its processes are redesigned. The second type of assessment is environmental impact assessment (EIA). Although this name sounds like it applies to several types of environmental analysis, in the strict use of the word, it applies only to investigating the impact of developing a business site (i.e. its buildings and grounds and their connection to the local environment and infrastructure). The third type is the environmental audit (EA), whose methods, generally, can be used as a broad assessment of the overall impacts of the company, that is it can investigate everything from a companies material supplies to its accounting practices. The environmental audit can also be focused on a particular department like purchasing or an issue like energy consumption. When the environmental audit is done the first time, it may be called a baseline audit or an environmental review. When it is done periodically after the first time, it is called an environmental audit.
The EA, LCA, and EIA have a lot of things in common. These include:
o Commitment: from top management to undertake the analysis and to communicate the purpose and needs of the audit to employees; o Definition of Scope of Audit: the objectives of analysis (e.g. reduction of energy or material use; achieving legal compliance) and limitations to particular activities, products, or sites of the company; o Team Assembly: usually the analysis team will have to be assembled from various
divisions within a company and include expertise from outside the company; o Investigation: information for the analysis can be gathered from three main sources: existing procedure manuals, compliance records, and other information held by the company or another party; interviews with or questionnaires sent to employees; and on-site inspections; o Input, conversion, output: impacts can be determined from data about material and energy to the company and the outputs from the many processes that convert that material into products, byproducts, emissions and wastes; o Measurement: where possible quantitative measurements should be made of the material, energy, labor etc. absorbed by an activity; o Documentation: results of the analysis should be recorded; o Analysis: comparison against scientific, managerial, and legal understanding and standards. o Reports: results of the analysis with clarification of issues and suggestions for improvements should be reported to top management.
10.2 The Product: Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA)
Life-cycle analysis clarifies the environmental impact of the company’s primary activities because it is focused on the inputs and outputs caused by the design of the product. The design of a product is responsible for 80-90 percent of its environmental impacts—impacts that include the materials that go into the product; what type of processes the product undergoes; the materials and energy that are used in processing and delivery of the product; how the product is used; and how the product is disposed of or recycled. These design impacts influence not only the primary activities of producing an delivering a product, but also most of the secondary activities such as EHS, R&D, facilities, management, human resources and even accounting. Thus an LCA is needed to understand the direct environmental impacts of a product, a products impact on upstream and downstream activities, and secondary impacts at all stages.
Definition: Life-cycle assessment is the compilation of the inputs and outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product or process throughout the entire lifecycle.
Inputs and outputs can occur at any stage of the product cycle from cradle to cradle (or grave). The LCA then attempts to evaluate their impact on the environment (i.e their environmental burden). As depicted in figure 10.i below, these stages include at least: resources extraction, materials processing, parts manufacture, product assembly, distribution, consumption, materials collection, and recycling (or disposal). LCA identifies each of these inputs and outputs and quantifies them were possible.
labor, rent, waste disposal ands other types of overhead, liability costs, and costs arising from potential shifts in social attitudes and government regulations. Because the LCA is not limited to the company, it can also help to determine the cost of environmental impacts to suppliers and customers. The LCA also provides useful information for government regulators, environmentalists, insurers, and others who may want to know about the environmental impact of your company’s products. Below is a list of several reasons for an LCA.
o education and communication, o product design (design for the environment), o product development and improvement /R&D o pollution prevention o assessment and reduction of potential liability, o strategic planning, o assessing and improving environmental program, o development of policy and regulations, o individual and organizational purchasing/procurement, o labeling, o developing market strategies, and o environmental management systems/environmental performance evaluation.
The most important outcome of an LCA is its application for redesigning a product through Design for Environment (DfE). Indeed, the LCA lays the groundwork for bringing the business lifecycle and the physical lifecycle together through the redesign of the product. The product is redesigned to improve the overall environmental performance not only with methods to improve its lifespan, recyclability and so on, but also to concentrate improvements at the most crucial stages of transformation—whether those be at the extraction, manufacture, transportation, use or disposal of the product. If, for example, the greatest environmental impact arises from the use of the product, it will probably be best to emphasize reducing that impact, rather than limit attention to pollution caused in manufacturing. Alternative designs of the product can be conceived and compared for their relative impacts. Besides reducing environmental impact, the physical lifecycle analysis also provides new sources of value by cutting energy and material costs, eliminating waste charges, and offering new income streams through the production of by-products or recycling. It does this not only for the company itself but also for suppliers and customers, and in creating value for them, creates more potential profits for the company that undertakes the DfE.
In this review of the LCA we are not concerned with DfE, but focus on creating knowledge of environmental impacts. Any company—anywhere on the product cycle—can use LCA knowledge readily to improve its environmental performance, whereas DfE is primarily a focus of goods producing companies. It is important to note that the use of the LCA is not limited to manufacturing firms. More importantly, it is important to the service firms that make up the majority of our economy (and all developed economies). The products that service firms use and sell are dependent on hundreds or thousands of energy and goods produced by manufacturers. By using the principles of
LCA to determine the environmental impacts of the goods and energy they use, and choosing their suppliers on that basis, service companies—retailers, telecommunication companies, financial companies, transport companies, restaurants, amusement parks, housing estates, etc.—can have an enormous influence on reducing environmental impacts. The four stages of an LCA are sketched below.
Figure 10.ii Stages of an LCA
In practice a LCA has to be a collaborative team exercise. Internally, in regard to its own stage of the product cycle, a firm must rely on people from all departments to provide information concerning design of the product, processing systems used, facilities and their maintenance, packaging and advertising, the cost of environmental protection activities, etc. Externally, the LCA firm must rely on firms in other stages, with different responsibilities, to supply them with information. For example, extracting firms must detail the damage caused by their activities, manufacturers have the crucial ability to analyze how a product is made and record its inputs and outputs, users need to record how their use affects energy and material use, transporters need to report how volume, mass and configuration of a product affect costs, and recyclers need to report on ease of disassembly and acceptance of recycled goods. The LCA firm can add up all their impacts and the impacts from the other firms to determine their total environmental burden.
Scoping and Boundary Setting A complete LCA of any product is a time consuming and expensive process, and few companies have the capability to do a thorough lifecycle analysis of all the stages their product passes through. For that reason the most important phase of the LCA process is scoping and boundary setting. The scope of the LCA is usually determined by the reason it is being done. If the purpose is for education, awareness raising, or for strategy, then the level of detail does not need to be that high. If, however, the LCA is for DfE or for reporting to auditors or government authorities, then a more detailed study is required.
Scoping
Modeling
Impact Assessment
Interpretation
Figure 10.iii Model for Lifecycle inputs into Any Industry
Figure 10.vi Lifecycle inputs and outputs in the computer industry
An LCA, however, is a more detailed analysis of each stage to find its contributions to the whole. Figure 10.v is a generic model of how any stage can be analyzed. Its relationship to other stages is shown in figure 10.vi. How each stage is broken down for greater detail is shown by figures 10.vii and 10.viii. Within each major stage, smaller stages can be identified and their inputs and outputs revealed.
Figure 10.vii Detailed Analysis of Manufacturing Stage
Figure 10.viii Detailed Analysis of Plastics Molding Stage
Information sources Collecting the information for the LCA is the labor and time intensive aspect of the process. Information can be gathered from the following sources: o data supplied by your own company o data supplied by suppliers and purchasers o data supplied by industry associations and government research o commercial LCA or other data bases o literature research o theoretical calculations and qualified guessing
Measurement Measurement of the inputs and outputs is also important to identify the severity of environmental impacts and their financial costs. In addition to the previously mentioned scoping implications of choosing functional measures, all measures should be chosen with
the intention of making impacts comparable across stages and among different alternatives. Measurements can be categorized as quantitative measures that simply tell you how much of a particular input or output is being produced. They can also be categorized as qualitative measures that will help identify environmental impacts and allow for impact comparison between different fuels or material uses. Some quantitative and qualitative measures are listed below.
Quantitative Measures for inputs and outputs o Energy: kilowatts, horsepower, megajoules o Water: liters, gallons o Air: kilograms, grams o Materials: kilograms, pounds, tons
Qualitative measures for inputs and outputs: o Energy: renewable, nonrenewable o Water: BOD (biological oxygen demand) o Air: kilograms, parts per million of carbon monoxide, lead, etc. o Materials: renewable, nonrenewable, recyclable
Impact Assessment
Impact assessment is the determination of the different impacts that each of the different inputs and outputs will have on the environment. To do so the impact assessment must organize all the data produced from the model and its inventory of inputs and outputs. There are four stages to this process.
Classification: classification places the inventory data into one of several categories of major environmental impacts. Several levels of these classifications can be structured to show the impacts from different perspectives. These provide useful indicators for decision-making and analysis. The figure 10.ix shows that at inventory emissions such as SO^2 , NOX, or methane may be classified into mid-point classifications of acidification, respiratory, and climate change respectively. These may be further classified into endpoints of ecosystem quality and human health. Classification is thus a qualitative distinction.
Localization Localization describes the different effects that a pollutant will have in different environments. The pollutant is measured against its affects relative to other pollutants in an area and relative to the areas assimilative capacity. For example, sewage dumped into an already polluted harbor will have less effect than dumped into a natural lagoon; and sewage dumped into a large open sea area is likely to be assimilated easier than an enclosed lagoon.
Interpretation The LCA attempts to describe where the environmental burdens are the greatest. However, for any process or any chain of processes there will be a large number of impacts that are not directly comparable, for example; what is more important toxic disruption of human health or increases in greenhouse gases? There are some useful weighting techniques, including monetization, which help to do this. However, despite all attempts to be objective in the creation and comparative use of measures, ultimately there will be some value judgments made about what are the greater impacts.
Relation to Your Project
Doing a LCA with a reasonable amount of detail on the main product of your company will give you a sound understanding of your companies real environmental impacts. It an essential basis if you want to introduce an environmentally friendly product into your company’s business (by itself that would be enough of a challenge for your project). The LCA is also an essential for building an industrial ecology for your firm.
REFERENCES
o M. Goedkoop and M. Oele 2002. Introduction into LCA Methodology and Practice with SimaPro 5. PRe Consultants. (on website as Ch.5_SimaPro.pdf) o J.A. Todd and M.A. Curran 1999. Streamlined Life-Cycle Assessment. Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). (on website as Ch.5_SETAC.pdf) o Chapter 15 (and 16) in T.E. Graedel and B.R. Allenby 2003. Industrial Ecology. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. o Introduction & Overview, chapters 1 & 2 in Ciambrone, D.F. 1997. Environmental Life Cycle Analysis. New York: Lewis Publishers.
10.3 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
Environmental impact assessment has many steps similar to the EA and LCA, but it is only used for the development of new sites or the refurbishment of old sites. Therefore it is not directly used to examine a firm’s existing impacts. The following explanation is
intended to fill out the range of processes considered to be impact analysis. This information is taken in entirety from: http://www.gdrc.org/uem/eia/whatiseia.html.
Definition: Environmental Impact Assessment is a tool used for decision-making regarding projects, developments and programmes such as incinerators, airport runways, pig rearing and peat extraction. EIA is intended to identify the Environmental, Social and Economic impacts of a proposed development prior to decision-making.
This means that it is easy to identify;
- The most environmentally suitable option at an early stage.
- The Best Practicable Environmental Option.
- Alternative processes.
Project managers can then address these problems in order to avoid or minimise environmental impacts in conjunction with their project planning. This results in the likelihood of the project planning stages running smoother
The developer is responsible for the Environmental Assessment although the task is often carried out by Environmental Consultants. Environmental Assessment is carried out in order to produce an Environmental Statement, which must include:
- A description of the project: location, design, scale, size etc.
- Description of significant effects.
- Mitigating Measures
- A Non-Technical summary.
THE EIA PROCESS
There are two steps in EIA. The two stages are
- Preliminary Assessment: Carried out in the early stages of planning
- Detailed Assessment: Carried out during project planning until the project plan is completed and are reported formally as an Environmental Statement . SCOPING
What is Scoping?
Scoping is used to identify the key issues of concern at an early stage in the planning process. Scoping should be carried out at an early stage in order to aid site selection and identify any possible alternatives. The scoping process should involve all interested parties such as the proponent and planning or environmental agencies and members of the public. The results of scoping will form determine the scope, depth and terms of reference to be addressed within the Environmental Statement.
Mitigating Measures
This reviews the action taken to prevent, avoid or minimise the actual or potential adverse effects of a project. The measure could include the abandoning or modifying of a proposal, substitution of techniques using BATNEEC (Best Available Technology Not Entailing Excessive Costs). This would include the various pollution abatement techniques that would be required to reduce emissions to the legal limits.
Uncertainty
If the uncertainties are great, with the possibility of grave consequences and no mitigating measures then the development plan is rejected. If there are uncertainties that might me reduced by further studies then the application is deferred until further studies are carried out.
Environmental Statements
The EIA is the process required to produce the Environmental Statement. The EIS is a comprehensive document that reports the findings of the EIA. This is the final stage of the EIA process and is now often required by law before a new project can proceed.
A typical EIS can be broken down into three parts with different levels of detail:
Volume 1 - a comprehensive and concise document drawing together all relevant information regarding the project; Non-Technical Summary (NTS) - a brief report of volume one in non-technical language so that it can easily be understood by the public;
Volume 2 - a volume which contains detailed assessment of the significant environmental effects. (This is not necessary if there are no significant effects either before or after mitigation).
10.4 THE ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT
Reasons for an Environmental Audit
An audit is a formal examination and analysis of the records, assets, and procedures of company. A conventional audit examines the financial records of a company to determine its organizational efficiency, financial soundness, or to determine if it is paying the correct amount of taxes. The audit may be performed by a company’s own personnel or by an external auditor if independent verification is required. An environmental audit is a similar examination of the different ways a business (or part of a business) impacts the environment and of the company’s procedures for dealing with those impacts. When the audit is done for the first time, it creates a baseline of information that enables management to understand and report its environmental performance, and also to develop effective ways of improving environmental performance. When an audit is done on a
recurring basis, it enables the company to check how effective those improvements have been and devise new ones if necessary. An environmental audit is done for several reasons; for example: o Satisfy stakeholder demands such as those of customers, employees, insurers, investors and the government o Develop environmental policy o Achieve cost savings o Prioritize reduction efforts on greatest problems o Identify market opportunities o Evaluate environmental performance by comparing against other firms or industries o Build an environmental management system o Deal with present and future legal compliance issues
Environmental Audits Objectives
The obvious thing to look for in an environmental review is the direct physical impacts on the environment. However, these impacts are just the symptoms of practices followed by the company. Environmentally damaging practices should be revealed as well. In addition, originally and still the most important reason for a company to do an audit, is to know the legal liability of its impacts.
- Scientific and technical: This is the inventory, and where possible the measurement, of the different types of impact. This inventory will include what the resources and products the company brings in and what it puts out as waste or energy loss. It will identify the environmental impact of the things it brings in and the things it puts out. It will also identify all the different places in the company that use specific inputs and measure the outputs of their processing of them. In short an analysis of the resource and material flows through a company, and all the stages that affect that throughput. Examples of issues to be analyzed: o Sources of air, water, land, and noise pollution o Characteristics of pollution: toxicity, greenhouse gases, biodiversity damage, etc. o Local, regional, and global impacts o Energy use o Waste management, recycling, and disposal o Transportation of goods and people o Machinery and equipment used o Office activities o Facilities and landscaping
- Managerial: This is an investigation into whether the business has policies and practices to improve environmental performance. The investigation also considers whether these policies and practices are actually followed and to what extent they are effective.
Figure 10.x Stages of an Environmental Audit (Welford and Gouldson 1993: 108)
Pre-Audit Stage The pre-audit stage defines what is going to be audited by scoping the company’s environmental aspects; who is going to be on the team doing the auditing, and how the audit will proceed by conducting preliminary investigations of the industry and involvement of the workforce.
Scope of Environmental Audit Ideally the environmental review should cover the whole company to find out the company’s complete environmental impacts (figure 5.ii). A complete audit would cover all the environmental aspects of the company that may lead to environmental impacts:
o Products: impacts of materials included in product, and of the product in use and disposal o Processes: impacts of services, equipment, energy, processing materials, etc. used in production of good or service; including support services o Facilities: impacts of buildings, energy and materials used in operation and maintenance, and when demolished o Infrastructure usage: impacts of usage of company and employees of roads, sewers, and other infrastructure
Such comprehensive information on the whole company would enable the most efficient improvements because the connections between the various parts of the company’s activities could be revealed. All activities in the company, from logistics to accounting, are influenced by how the product is made. Their environmental impact will
Plan scope of audit
Select Audit Team
Industry Analysis
Involve Workforce
Examine policy
Inspect records
Examine lines of management
Interview staff
Evaluate findings
Report findings
Prepare action plan
Physical inspection
Pre-audit stage
Audit stage Post-audit stage
therefore be affected by their relationship with production and they should be evaluated by how they affect that relationship. Furthermore, it is more efficient to coordinate things across departments rather than each department simply doing things their own way. In short a complete company environmental audit can point out not only what environmental issues a company must deal with but also reveal synergies among departments to deal with those issues.
Fig. 10.xi A comprehensive audit across all departments and activities
Support Activities Top Management Human Resources
Accounting Site and Facilities
Purchasing Research and Development
Environment, Health & Safety
Primary Activities Logistics Production Distribution Marketing
Often, however, it is not possible to do a complete environmental audit. This might be because of cost reasons, because of lack of experience, or whatever. Therefore companies often prioritize what to audit by: departments, sites, activities or issues to review. The prioritization may be accomplished by a scoping audit. The scoping audit covers the whole organization to identify the most obvious environmental problems or areas to deal with. A more thorough audit is then conducted on that problem or area according to the three methods of analysis mentioned below. Any department can be the focus of a more thorough environmental review, and these are often done before carrying out the departmental specific programs discussed in following sections. In addition such issues or activities as those listed below can be the focus on a company wide basis or on a more limited basis. There is overlap with many of the issues dealt with in the three types of review analysis, but in this case they are singled out for special focus because of their important or damaging environment impact. o Energy use o Air, water, or land emissions o Waste management, recycling disposal o Legal compliance o Buildings and equipment o Staff training o Facilities and land purchases o Environmental policy o Products o Processes
Auditing direct and interrelated impacts
