Study concludes environmental management systems can boost performance, compliance

             CHAPEL HILL - Formal environmental management systems (EMS)
can improve the environmental performance of government units and
businesses as well as their operating and management efficiencies and,
sometimes, compliance with regulations, a major new study concludes.
             "These results are more likely for facilities that are
subsidiaries of publicly traded corporations, owing to their greater
resources, but they occur in privately held and government facilities as
well," said Dr. Richard N.L. Andrews of the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. "The evidence also suggests that these systems are highly
variable in their content, priorities and judgments of what is important.
"The existence of certification of an EMS per se does not necessarily
provide any clear information, or information comparable to other
facilities, about the facility's actual environmental performance,
compliance or rate of improvement."
             Andrews, professor of public policy and of environmental
sciences and engineering at UNC, and colleagues conducted the
first-of-its-kind study for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's
Office of Wastewater Management, with additional support from EPA's Office
of Policy, Economics and Innovation. Also involved in the five-year
project were 10 state environmental agencies, the Environmental Law
Institute, the Multi-State Working Group on Environmental Management
Systems, the Star Track Program of the EPA's Region I and the Global
Environmental Technology Foundation.
             "Environmental management systems identify what a company or
other organization is going to try to do to protect the environment, to
improve its performance and then for carrying through on that," Andrews
said. "They involve identifying what they do to the environment, training
people to fix it and preventing problems from happening again. The most
elaborate involve third-party certification with auditors coming in
annually to see whether the system works or not. However, the
certification of an EMS by itself does not necessarily provide any clear
information, or information comparable to other facilities, about the
facility's actual environmental performance, compliance or rate of
improvement."
             In their unique investigation, known as the National Database
on Environmental Management Systems study, the UNC-led team worked with 83
facilities in 17 states. Those programs ranged from big manufacturers,
electric utilities and small businesses to military bases and municipal
water treatment plants. Researchers asked what the organizations -- to
whom they promised anonymity -- were doing, how they created their EMS
system, what they had done previously and what happened since the system
was in place.
             "We got generous cooperation and found enormous variation in
what the facilities actually did," Andrews said. "Some focused on major
environmental problems such as hazardous waste, while others used them
simply to train employees to be more ecologically efficient with water,
energy and materials to save themselves money."
             Overall, most organizations said they were glad they
developed their EMS, and 86 percent reported that they had reaped benefits
from them, he said. That does not mean they were in perfect compliance
with environmental standards or were superior across the board.
             "When people get an international ISO 14001 certification,
they get to advertise that they are certified, which implies better
performance in some way than their competitors," Andrews said. "That may
or may not be since certification doesn't tell you whether they perform
better than other comparable facilities or organizations."
             Introducing an EMS cost an average of $40,000, he said.
Public-sector EMS costs could be cut through government assistance
programs aimed at developing and distributing EMS models, or templates,
for others to follow.
             Generally, EMSs had positive effects on facilities'
environmental performance, which makes sense, but which had not been
confirmed before through careful study, he said. While big, publicly
traded corporations fared better with EMSs since they had more money and
staff, government and smaller independent operations used them to build
previously unavailable capacities to do a better job.
             "One small independent supplier of parts for the automobile
industry put in an EMS to help define themselves as a leader in their own
small area," Andrews said. "That did not have any big economic benefit,
but it positioned the company to maintain their market share with a major
customer and possibly enlarge it. They also simply thought it was the
right thing to do."
      "We also found that these systems had positive effects for
government facilities, such as wastewater treatment plants and other
municipal government operations as well as miilitary bases. The ISO 14000
sysstem was developed mainly by big corporations for business use, but it
appears to be useful for other kinds of organizations as well," he said.
             "Putting in systems like these is not without cost, and it
takes a lot of work to do it," Andrews said. "The EPA and state agencies
are beginning to reward such efforts as a mark of good behavior. The
assumption is that an environmental management system is going to lead to
better performance, and agencies can reward companies that have done it in
various ways such as giving them greater regulatory flexibility."
             Andrews and colleagues have begun related research surveying
several thousand U.S. companies supplying the auto industry to see what
difference it makes to firms when their industrial customers require EMSs.