Environmental compliance means conforming to
environmental law
Environmental laws are laws that protect the environment. The term "environmental law" encompasses treaties, statutes, regulations, conventions, and policies designed to protect the natural environment and manage the impact of human activitie ...
s, regulations, standards and other requirements such as site permits to operate. In recent years,
environmental concerns have led to a significant increase in the number and scope of compliance imperatives across all global regulatory environments. Being closely related, environmental concerns and compliance activities are increasingly being aligned with corporate performance goals and being integrated to some extent to avoid conflicts, wasteful overlaps, and gaps.
Compliance with the above requirements and obligations, requires meeting certain conditions. Typically, these include:
* Managing monitoring programmes or schedules, ensuring that the monitoring required in the permit has been done, at the correct locations, for the correct parameters, and at the correct frequency
* Pre-processing, performing calculations and validating the data for compliance with any alert or reporting levels
* Generating routine compliance reports for authorities.
The management of the above can be complex and time-consuming, leading to an increasing uptake of software systems designed to manage environmental compliance. These are often referred to as 'Environmental Data Management Systems' (EDMS). Criteria must be considered when selecting environmental compliance software: proven capability, high performance, transparent, traceable data handling, a robust calculation engine, advanced factor handling, simple integration, automated workflows and QA, and flexible reporting and data extraction.
Regulations concerning toxic substances
* POP Environmental Compliance:
Persistent Organic Pollutants
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are organic compounds that are resistant to degradation through chemical, biological, and photolytic processes. They are toxic and adversely affect human health and the environment around the world. Becaus ...
(POPs) are halogenated organic substances that are regulated due to the
Stockholm Convention.
* REACH Environmental Compliance:
Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) applies to most products within the EU market. A declaration to the
European Chemicals Agency
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA; ) is an agency of the European Union working for the safe use of chemicals. It manages the technical and administrative aspects of the implementation of the European Union regulation called Registration, E ...
is required if a product contains more than 0.1% of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC).
* California Proposition 65 Environmental Compliance: Managed by the
California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), the California Proposition 65 regulation applies to all consumer goods sold in California and businesses with 10 or more employees.
* TSCA Environmental Compliance : Managed by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) applies to all substances and products manufactured in and imported to the United States.
* RoHS Environmental compliance :
Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is another regulation applicable to Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE).
See also
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MCERTS
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Environmental accounting
Environmental accounting is a subset of accounting proper, its target being to incorporate both economic and environmental information. It can be conducted at the corporate level or at the level of a national economy through the System of Integrat ...
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Environment, health and safety
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Emission standard
Emission standards are the legal requirements governing air pollutants released into the atmosphere. Emission standards set quantitative limits on the permissible amount of specific air pollutants that may be released from specific sources ov ...
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Environmental certification
Environmental certification is a form of environmental regulation and Environmental Development, development where a company can voluntarily choose to comply with predefined processes or objectives set forth by the certification service.Nebel. G, Q ...
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Environmental data Environmental data is that which is based on the measurement of environmental pressures, the state of the environment and the impacts on ecosystems. This is usually the "P", "S" and "I" of the DPSIR model where D = Drivers, P = Pressures, S = Stat ...
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Environmental monitoring
Environmental monitoring is the processes and activities that are done to characterize and describe the state of the environment. It is used in the preparation of environmental impact assessments, and in many circumstances in which human activit ...
References
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Regulatory compliance
Environmental policy