How Do I Earn an Environmental Management Degree?

An environmental management system (EMS) is a part of the management system of a company or other organization that develops and implements its environmental policy and manages its environmental factors, including the organizational structure needed to formulate, implement, implement, assess, and maintain the environmental policy , Planned activities, responsibilities, practices, procedures, processes and resources. ^[1]

Environmental management system

(Management Terminology)

The environmental management system can be described as follows: This is an organization that has planned and coordinated management activities, including standardized action procedures and documented control mechanisms. It is implemented through an organizational structure with clear responsibilities and obligations, with the goal of preventing adverse effects on the environment. ^[2]

Principle 1: Commitments and guidelines

An organization should develop an environmental policy and ensure that

The environmental management system audit refers to the audit of the environmental management system within the organization, and is the self-inspection and evaluation of the organization. The internal audit process should be controlled by procedures and carried out regularly. Internal audit should judge whether the environmental management system is in accordance with the predetermined arrangements

The ISO14000 environmental management system standard is an effective tool for creating green enterprises, and it is an internationally accepted standard. It can pass standard certification and effectively promote the continuous environmental management of enterprises and the sustainable development of the enterprise industry. . ISO14000 is a standard applicable to any organization. Due to the differences in specific situations between industries and organizations, many organizations cannot understand this feature of the standard. This broad applicability of the standard reflects that the standard is a basic standard and a management framework. Each organization must first understand the essence of the standard before it can implement it. In particular, ISO14000 is a standard related to environmental management. How to grasp environmental benefits, social benefits, and corporate benefits is a difficult problem. According to practical experience, the guiding principles for implementing ISO14001 are:

1. Environmental management serves the improvement of social environmental issues

In general, the operation and management of an organization serves the needs of the organization's own development, but the fundamental goal of environmental management is to meet the needs of social environmental protection and sustainable development. In many cases, environmental protection and enterprise development are a sharp contradiction. In order to survive and develop, enterprises will choose the latter regardless of environmental protection. With the deterioration of the global environmental situation, it is urgent to protect the environment and improve the environment. The public's environmental awareness has gradually increased, and the government's environmental management laws and regulations have become increasingly strict. Therefore, companies must implement environmental management.

2. The role of leadership

The high attention and strong leadership of the company's top management is the guarantee of environmental management and the key to success. Since the top management is the decision-making layer of the organization, it determines and controls the development of the organization, and at the same time provides funds and manpower guarantees for management activities. It also plays a coordinating and guiding role in the implementation process, so the role of leadership is important. of. There are two main manifestations of leadership failure in environmental management. One is that leaders do not understand environmental issues well and cannot make decisions and judgments in this regard. They simply delegate this work to a department. Such work tends to deviate greatly. The second is weak leadership, unable to better coordinate the management of various departments, making environmental management work very difficult, and often fail midway. The reason for the above problems is that the leadership quality is low and incompetent. One of the leadership selection and training mechanisms in our country is to exercise and train on the job, which is very detrimental to management. Every position, whether it is the highest leadership level or an ordinary operation position, requires a competent employee to serve, so that the role of the position can be brought into full play. "Employee training" means that the employee is incompetent before he is trained as a competent person In this process, due to the incompetence of the employee, many job deviations were caused, and some results were very unfavorable. Especially in the process of environmental management, incompetent personnel should not be allowed to work, because once environmental problems are caused, the consequences will be serious and irreversible.

3 Full participation in environmental management

Environmental management is a management task, but it does not mean that management is only a matter of management. If employees can participate in management well, it will be very helpful to management. It was found in corporate environmental management that managers do not communicate effectively with employees, but only give orders to employees, so employees' incomprehension or even resistance to orders prevents them from being effectively executed. When the order is not effectively executed, managers are more willing to attribute it to the low quality of the staff, causing this problem to be solved.

4 Implement process control

A process is a system of activities that translates inputs into resources used by outputs. The purpose of the process is to increase its value. Any activity can be managed as a process. Process management can greatly improve efficiency.

In the general product production process, the result of production is a tangible product, so the control of the result can have two situations: one is the direct control of the production result-the product, generally the inspection method is used, Rejection of qualified products; Another situation is to control the production process to reduce the possibility of non-conforming products. The first method is widely used, which can effectively control the quality of the product, but the loss of the company is large, because the defective product must be reworked or scrapped. This is a huge waste of resources. Process control can significantly reduce this waste and guarantee quality. A similar situation exists in environmental management: end governance and process control. End-of-life treatment refers to the development and implementation of effective treatment technologies for the produced pollutants at the end of the production process. End-of-line governance is an important stage in the development of environmental management. It is conducive to eliminating pollution incidents and also slows down the trend of environmental pollution and destruction caused by production activities to a certain extent. However, as time goes on and the industrialization process accelerates, the limitations of end-of-line governance are becoming increasingly apparent. First, large investment in pollution treatment facilities and high operating costs increase the cost of production and reduce economic benefits. Thorough treatment, but the transfer of pollutants, such as flue gas de-dusting, dust removal to form a large number of waste residues, centralized treatment of wastewater to generate a large amount of sludge, etc., so pollution cannot be eradicated; Third, the end treatment does not involve the effective use of resources and cannot stop nature Waste of resources. Therefore, to truly solve the pollution problem, we need to implement process control, reduce the generation of pollution, and fundamentally solve environmental problems.

5. keep improve

Continuous improvement is an important means for an organization to actively seek opportunities for improvement and strive to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Since the environmental problem is a problem of continuous development and continuous improvement, the goal of environmental management is continuous improvement, which is also in line with the principle of sustainable development.

It is relatively easy for companies to take measures to improve environmental performance. After the environment is improved, maintaining the current level of environmental management and environmental management performance can also be carried out. However, it is more difficult to improve management performance because managers lack continuous improvement awareness. Regarding "improvement", the managers of enterprises more understand it as failing to meet the standard or not meeting the requirements, or meeting the standard through improvement. This work cannot actually be called "quot: improvement". correct". "Improvement" should refer to the continuous improvement of the standards being met. Because of the improvement of standards, if the enterprise can still meet the standards through efforts, then the enterprise is "improving" at this time. It is not enough to do "improvement" once. Starting from the long-term development and environmental protection requirements of an enterprise, what the enterprise needs is "continuous improvement".

An environmental management system is a part of the management system of an enterprise or other management organization. It is used to formulate and implement its environmental policy and manage its environmental elements, including the organizations and plans needed to formulate, implement, implement, review and maintain the environmental policy. Activities, responsibilities, practices, procedures, processes and resources. The environmental policy is the elements of the activities, products or other services that the top management is an enterprise or other organization that can interact with the environment (such as noise, waste gas and solid waste emissions, waste of energy, products and other packaging and waste) Difficult to handle etc) .. Environmental performance is a measurable result of the management of environmental factors by a company or other organization.