Environmental compliance means conforming to
environmental law
Environmental law is a collective term encompassing aspects of the law that provide protection to the environment. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the manage ...
s, regulations, standards and other requirements such as site permits to operate. In recent years,
environmental concerns
Environmental issues are effects of human activity on the biophysical environment, most often of which are harmful effects that cause environmental degradation. Environmental protection is the practice of protecting the natural environment on t ...
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.
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 Integrated ...
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Environment, health and safety Environment (E), health (H) and safety (S), EHS is an acronym for the set that studies and implements the practical aspects of protecting the environment and maintaining health and safety at occupation. In simple terms it is what organizations must ...
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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 over ...
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Environmental certification
Environmental certification is a form of environmental regulation and development where a company can voluntarily choose to comply with predefined processes or objectives set forth by the certification service.Nebel. G, Quevedo. L, Jacobsen. J, Hel ...
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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 = State ...
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Environmental monitoring
Environmental monitoring describes the processes and activities that need to take place to characterize and monitor the quality of the environment. Environmental monitoring is used in the preparation of environmental impact assessments, as well a ...
References
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Regulatory compliance
Environmental policy