Beyond Environmental Management to Quantifiable Pollution Management

Abstract

Stakeholders increasingly have a heightened expectation of organisational commitment to good environmental and societal practice. Proponents of the link between environmental and financial performance have argued that pollution reduction provides future cost savings by increasing efficiency, reducing compliance costs, and minimising future liabilities. Environmental management systems such as BS EN ISO 14001:1996 or the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) do not require organisations to comment on overall environmental performance. BS EN ISO 14001: 1996 simply advocates that the organisation should have viewed each particular function of the business process and applied a self- formulated quantitative / qualitative analysis to the function in question, providing no incentive to add a level of independently verifiable transparency to the analysis process.

This thesis investigates whether it is possible to develop an environmental management system that is capable of delivering a quantitative social / economic statement based on the pollutant aspects / effects of the organisation.

A model for quantitative pollution management (QPM) is developed, and a scoring mechanism is defined which enables an indicator of pollution performance to be derived. This indicator reviews the organisation as a whole system, as well as commenting on its constituent parts. The indicator is based upon evaluation of five areas, those of management /leadership, inputs, controls, activities, and outputs. The model is tested in industry by an audit of a manufacturing organisation in South Wales, and a numeric QPM indicator is derived. The numeric QPM indicator is subsequently considered by means of a qualitative interpretation of the quantitative indicator score. The qualitative interpretation is then considered against the impression of the organisation gained by the author during the conduct of the audit.

Potential future work in relation to QPM is considered, and the possible application of the concepts of fuzzy logic to QPM is given.

Date of Award	Mar 2003
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hefin Rowlands (Supervisor)