Environment and sustainability responsibilities in health and safety

Dr Anne Miller looks at the challenges and opportunities that the environment and sustainability responsibilities are generating, how different organisations are addressing them, and how safety and health professionals can ensure they are suitably informed to respond.

To some extent, looking after health and safety for an organisation is the same as looking after its environmental responsibilities, as both require compliance with an ever-growing range of regulations, keeping detailed records, and continuous policing.

However, the environment brings into play more economic and business drivers that can make a major difference to the organisation’s success. Indeed, the business performance of many organisations is already being significantly dictated by their response to the challenges of the environment and sustainability. And those challenges, and the opportunities that go with them, are set to intensify in the future.

Meeting environmental responsibilities demands a different set of knowledge and skills from those usually employed by the safety and health practitioner. I believe such skills provide very important personal and professional development opportunities for practitioners, but are those opportunities right, and, indeed, available for everyone, and how is the safety and health profession responding?

How organisations are rising to the challenge

Ten years ago saw we began to see the word ‘environment’ tacked on to more and more job advertisements for safety and health specialists, as organisations started to recognise that this was another responsibility that needed to be addressed. The original feeling was that meeting these responsibilities meant coming to grips with yet more regulations, so really, it was just an extension of the processes they already had in place for safety and health, wasn’t it? The logical step for many, therefore, was to lump them together — overload for the poor safety and health specialist but, organisationally, the most appropriate solution.

But it soon began to dawn on them what the challenge really meant: not just putting in place measures that would meet legislation but coming to terms with whole new concepts such as corporate responsibility, reputation, and business opportunity. They began to realise that it’s all about business risk, brand reputation, meeting the demands of stakeholders — not just making sure that the organisation is on the right side of ‘paragraph 3 sub-section 2’ of some complex regulation. Consequently, many came to the conclusion that the safety and health manager was not the right repository; and that the skills set required was radically different.

These days, a clear pattern has evolved. The majority of very large organisations have decided that the challenge is so significant they must employ specialists, often teams of them, and people with skills that have minimal crossover with traditional safety and health practice. Some of them operate under the broad umbrella of corporate responsibility or sustainability, while others have specific environmental responsibilities, such as management of energy resources and the carbon footprint.

In those organisations that don’t see the need for, or can’t afford, environmental specialists, but who have nevertheless decided that environmental responsibilities don’t fit within the safety and health function, they are usually looked after by the quality department, or facilities management. This is particularly the case where meeting the company’s responsibility is driven by the need for systems — for example, because they are part of a supply chain in which their customers demand they have ISO 9001 or 14001. Even in industry, some companies are happy that facilities management is the right discipline to deal with (what they see as) their primary environmental obligations: the effective disposal of waste and the judicious use of scarce resources.

No sitting back

Of course, the great majority of businesses with a safety and health specialist can’t afford separate environmental specialisation so they have no choice but to allocate the whole lot to the former. They generally have no choice but to accept, so the challenge is to find the most effective and rapid route to the required levels of competence.

Whatever the situation, the bottom line is that the health and safety specialist can’t ignore the environment. In every organisation — whether there are environmental specialists, or the responsibility is elsewhere — there must be a bridge with the safety and health function. The enlightened practitioner will be proactive in establishing that bridge by developing his or her own understanding of environmental concerns, and even reaching out to their colleagues on that side.

The bridge is crucial because environmental specialists, more often than not, need health and safety support to implement their actions in the workplace. Quality managers can develop environmental systems but, in practice, they will need to include health and safety dimensions. Facilities managers can develop processes for dealing with waste, and energy and water efficiency, but they must include in their processes the health and safety implications. Some organisations have formalised the set-up, and it is not unusual now to see health and safety specialists reporting in to the Corporate Responsibility department.

In terms of regulation, this crossover is certainly happening. The new EU REACH Regulations on the control of chemical substances, for example, are being implemented in the UK under a partnership initiative between the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency. Similarly, disposal of hazardous waste involves control processes and liaison with both these bodies. So even organisations that have environment and sustainability people creating policy at the top, implementation at shop-floor level (or equivalent) requires a unified approach.

I would argue that if the health and safety function isn’t in a position to respond to the environmental challenge, it risks becoming a backwater within the organisation — an activity, which, though important, is essentially marginal to the mainstream operation. It’s no good denying responsibility. Continuity is the practitioner’s responsibility as much as anyone else’s, and that means that the practitioner’s knowledge has to develop in parallel — not in specialist detail, but to the extent that they can understand and empathise with environmental terminology and concepts, and play their part in the actions and strategies that are identified.

Challenges and opportunities

These days, it is unforgivable for any organisation not to know and understand their environmental responsibilities — not only because it means they are risking damage to the environment and damaging their business by incurring penalties but also because they are missing out on positive business benefits.

In many companies, even those at the top don’t understand the sheer range of opportunities to improve environmental processes and, in doing so, to save or even make money. By being the ones to enlighten them safety and health professionals can really boost their status.

In terms of the economic drivers and opportunities, the most important is energy/carbon management. However, for safety and health practitioners, this can also be one of the biggest hurdles, because addressing it in all its respects often means going beyond anything they’ve done before. In effect, we now have parallel economies — the normal financial system and a new carbon economy, with trading being carried out in both — so organisations have to understand and comply with quotas under the EU’s Energy Transfer Scheme,1 or our own government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC),2 and understand that exceeding those quotas incurs a cost, while coming in under them is actually a profit opportunity.

Waste is another business driver that is poorly understood. Landfill tax is going up by some 15 per cent annually, and there is now extra regulation on treating waste before disposal, which is likely to involve considerable further costs. Clearly, proper waste planning will be the only way to avoid a potential haemorrhaging of cost in this direction, especially where hazardous waste is involved. Haulage costs are also rising dramatically, so the less waste you generate, the less you have to pay in this respect, also.

Of course, it is not necessary for the safety and health practitioner to become a market trader but the more he or she knows, the greater the contribution they can make, and the more empowered they will be. But it’s not just knowledge that enables broad-brush strategic development for the future that is important but also knowledge that can make an immediate difference. Energy saving, for example, isn’t only about reducing the carbon footprint, it’s about actually saving cost directly — and that is where the safety and health professional can make an immediate contribution.

With the right training, critical knowledge on issues such as energy saving and waste management can be picked up quickly, and, indeed, doesn’t demand anything more than some focused structured thought.

It is also vital to know about the professional help that’s available, all of it at no cost. Most people know about the help available from the Carbon Trust, in terms of assessing carbon footprints, but it doesn’t end there by any means. Equally valuable support is available from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP),3 which promotes markets for recycled waste; Envirowise,4 which gives advice on best practice across the full spectrum of environmental management, such as water saving and waste minimisation; and the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP),5 which brokers possibilities between companies for the re-use of waste.

Courses of action

The safety and health community is reacting to these challenges in various ways. Some see it as just another add-on — an overload, a cross to bear. Others are welcoming it as an unprecedented opportunity not only to develop but also to become empowered in a way that has never been possible before.

I have seen many examples of safety and health specialists who have reluctantly accepted an instruction from above to learn about the environment and who, after a few days of training, take on a new lease of life! And it’s nothing to do with age — it’s not only the young idealists who are embracing environment but practitioners with years of experience, who welcome the refreshing impact of new ways of thinking and additional disciplines, and set off in a new direction, motivated by a real understanding of how it all fits together.

Effective training options are available to address each level of awareness — from the basic need to know and be able to communicate on environmental issues, to the post-graduate/masters level of skill, which underpins contribution at the very highest reaches of the organisation.

At the basic level, there are various environmental foundation courses, one of which includes an exam approved by the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA). Typically, they are of three days’ duration and provide an introduction to UK legislative requirements, and to the concepts of environmental auditing and waste minimisation. They are aimed at those who want to understand the background and be able to engage in dialogue. There is also a more gently-paced, five-day IOSH Managing environmental responsibilities course.

The key formal qualification is the IEMA Certificate in Environmental Management. Normally a 10-day course, this is the most popular course in terms of gaining specialist knowledge and the ability to implement that knowledge. It is relevant for managers and others who have a specialist environmental role and require a working knowledge of environmental management and how it applies to their organisation. It includes relevant business issues, government policy and targets, resource and energy management, and environmental aspects and impacts.

The NEBOSH Specialist Diploma in Environmental Management is a five-day course, which goes further into such areas as quantitative risk assessment on environmental issues and cost-benefit analysis. An IEMA Diploma is also about to be launched, and will be in the form of a three-week programme, covering additional areas such as sustainability management, behavioural change, and effective communications.

A small number of institutions offers post-graduate and MSc-level qualifications in health, safety and environmental management. This level of professional development truly opens up all the opportunities for an integrated, genuinely business-orientated approach, understanding the legislative drivers, as well as the economic and business drivers across all disciplines, and the management of relevant business risks — all true board-level skills.

There are also formal courses designed to help those who will not be specialists within the organisation but will share the overall responsibility for addressing the issue. For example, my own organisation, Woodland Grange, together with the IEMA, has devised and is now piloting a new one-day course in environmental management for senior executives, designed to help them understand the framework of corporate governance, the key international and UK directives, their liabilities, and the strategies that are available for environmental control at executive level.

Not for everyone?

The need for dedicated safety and health specialists will never go away — in fact, the need is stronger now than at any time in the past. But a basic knowledge of the principles of environmental issues and sustainability is essential for safety and health professionals, if they don’t want to be left outside the mainstream of organisational discussion and development.

While some practitioners will dig their heels in and resist this incursion into their professional lives, in my experience there are few real reactionaries. Most specialists see this new era as an unprecedented opportunity to establish their discipline and further their careers to a higher level than has been possible before.

References

1 The EU Energy Transfer Scheme (ETS) began operation in 2007 and requires all major industries to work within a ‘cap and trade’ system in respect of carbon. Quotas of greenhouse gases are now monitored, and every EU member has to negotiate its quota annually. If a country exceeds that quota, it incurs a penalty in terms of cost, since it will have to buy carbon credits on the open market

2 The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) currently being implemented by the government applies to any sort of business not covered by the EU ETS — including non-manufacturers, such as supermarket chains, hotel groups and the public sector in general — that has an annual energy bill of £500,000, or more. The scheme comes fully into operation in 2010, and will also involve a cap and trade mechanism. Organisations failing to meet their commitment will be required to pay for permits, with fines being recycled by DEFRA into further national energy-saving initiatives

3 WRAP — the Waste and Resources Action programme: www.wrap.org.uk

4 Envirowise — www.envirowise.gov.uk

5 NISP — the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme: www.nisp.org.uk