By All Standards

The Truth About Aspects and Impacts in ISO 14001

• Auva Certification • Episode 17

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Summary

In this conversation, Alex from JWA Management Consulting discusses the intricacies of ISO 14001 and environmental management systems. He explains the concepts of aspects and impacts, common pitfalls organisations face, and the importance of engaging employees in the process. The discussion also covers how to identify significant aspects, the role of legal compliance, and the importance of stakeholder engagement. Alex emphasises the need for continuous improvement and shares tools and resources that can aid organisations in their environmental management journey. The conversation concludes with success stories and contact information for further engagement.


Takeaways

Aspects are how an organisation interacts with the environment.

Impacts are the consequences of those interactions.

Many organisations treat environmental management as a tick-box exercise.

Engaging employees at all levels is crucial for effective environmental management.

Identifying aspects requires a thorough understanding of the organisation's operations.

Significant aspects are those that could have a major impact on the environment.

Legal compliance is a key component of environmental management.

Stakeholder engagement can drive improvements in environmental practices.

Continuous improvement is essential for effective environmental management.

Tools and resources are available to assist organisations in their environmental journey.



Key Links

Auva Website: www.auva.com

Apple Podcast:  https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/by-all-standards/id1771677594

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/79OUNj3vY9dmESR3okwHJa?si=871837f56dc149b6

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@auvacertification/podcasts

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/auva-certification-ltd 

Instagram: @auvacert

Michael Venner:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvenner-isocertificationexpert/ 

JWA Management Consultancy Website: https://www.jwallcock.co.uk/

JWA Management Consultancy LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jwa-management-consulting/posts/?feedView=all

Alex Holford LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-holford-pcqi-564414240/

Most people implementing ISO 14001 treat aspects and impacts like a form to fill out, but this process is the backbone of environmental responsibility and today's guest is going to show us how to get it right. Before we get started, I have a quick disclaimer. On all our podcasts we are not recommending any specific ISO consultant. There are a number of consultants out there, many of which are available on our website. Enjoy the podcast. Okay, hi Alex. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, pleasure. So I'm Alex Holford, work on behalf of JWA Management Consulting, a small family run business basically in the West Midlands. Most people will probably be familiar with Richard Allcock's name. We tend to stretch around, as I said, West Midlands, but normally you can find us around Wolverhampton, West Brom, certainly towards Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. far reaching clients, a few of Manchester way and more so getting some new clients down towards Devon and Cornwall. So yeah, not afraid to travel a little bit, but all good. covering the whole country. I remember when Richards Dad was doing it. So that's how many years I go back. Yeah, long time, long time. Cool. So we're going to talk about aspects and impacts and things like that. So for newer people to ISO 14001, how do you explain what aspects and impacts actually are? Because it is a confusing term, I suppose, when you've never heard of it before. when you first are introduced to it, they're very different words for necessarily people that aren't involved in environmental management or just basically consequences of actions. So what I try and word it as is interactions and impacts. So sort of trying to destigmatize the word aspect and basically just say to people that it's how your organisation is interacting with that environment. So that could be. long reaching activities could be immediate day to day stuff like lights. But then the impact is either long term consequences behind the scenes or again resource use that's already happened and actually you're just getting the benefit from it at that point in time. Yeah. So then the impact is on the environment or on the business? How is that? Impact on the environment. Yeah, so it all talks about the activity. So the aspect you're completing as a business and the impact that you're resulting on the environment. Okay, so it's quite a central thing to the environmental management system. Why are we... yeah, good, why is that? was just going to say you can't really have the environmental management system, the EMS without a thorough understanding of that, that core business aspects, really. Yeah, so suppose a big part of the environmental standard is making sure you're basically compliant with the legislation and reducing your impact, isn't it? That's the whole fundamental purpose of it, really. Yeah, OK. So what do most companies get wrong when they're doing the aspects and impacts? Is there a key thing that you see? I think obviously to begin with, when people first interact with it, it may be seeing it a bit of a tick box exercise. So looking at things they know impact their financial situation. So energy usage, consumption, stock, and they sort of tick those boxes off very quickly. I think a lot of people don't necessarily consider activities or aspects that wouldn't occur if their organisation wasn't present. So when we think about use of contractors, supply chain impact for services, not just necessarily product or supporting services, especially where we're now looking at the use of AI and the energy usage along with that, or necessarily the life cycle of products they are using and how terminal that is and rather than reusable. So I think quite often they get caught out by not looking necessarily as deep enough into their organisation. Okay, so to kind of just scratch the surface and then forget about or don't think about all the indirect things that are... sometimes it can be an employee base as well so they haven't necessarily consulted all the way down to everybody working either hands-on with tools or in those office chairs where they don't necessarily interact with them all day long so they don't know the exact specifics of how a process might work. It could just be the overview that we're consulting on and we really have to drill down into those processes sometimes. Yeah, okay. So how do you guide someone down this path of what's the first step? So if I'm new and I'm getting ISO 14001 and we need to do the aspects and impact, how do we get to that point? What's the first step? I think it's exactly how we're treating at the moment. It's making sure that people have a thorough understanding of the core concept. But sometimes that's easiest done in a conversation. So it's speaking to quite often our client at a top level if we're working with top management and getting that engagement in the new ISO process and getting the leadership side involved and explaining to them that they can have the conversations with us. can. do assessments on their company to say, look, these are the hotspots we think are your aspects. But actually, it then becomes creating that culture of reflection and review on what they do internally and involve in different people. No differently to what you do within a health and safety system. You're going to consult your workers and you're going to say, look, we think this is one of the biggest risks. So one of the aspects we're completing is doing this. Do you agree? Or is there anything you think we've missed? you using a product or are you using a core resource that we've overlooked? Quite often, the more people you can involve from different areas and different jobs, the better. Okay, yeah, so if I'm a leader I might think this is how we do it, but actually the grassroots people on the ground, say hang on a minute. Yeah, cool. And it always comes back to that phrase, you don't know what you don't know. So quite often people will happily talk about what they do for work, the bits of their job that might necessarily cause non-conformities as far as products concerned will actually drain more resources or create unwanted waste in that process or might require rework and even often more subcontracting. So I think Those conversations which are often at the forefront of the business process can then shed light on aspects that top management might miss because they're just thinking about the processes or the systems they have working within each department rather than the core activities. Okay, so you really need to drill down with the workers to make sure you're extracting all that information. Okay. Yeah. And then I think secondly to that as well. I think a good organisation will always try and seek expertise outside or bring that external expertise on board and try and make it organic. But there's often a lot of reports that go along with the energy management or facilities management. And that's probably one of the second most beneficial documents we can sort of reach for. So when we think about a TM 44 for air con and energy assessment, that tells us a lot straight off the bat about the company. when they've got it in place because not always aware of these legal requirements. And then if you take a step back and say, well, they should have aircon servicing that can tell you a lot as well about leak testing. A lot of these just aren't necessarily on the forefront of people's minds who get the benefit of air conditioning or are considering that development. Okay, now I understand. So is there a tool that you use to do this kind of aspects? like document it, software, workshops, spreadsheets? internally, yeah, we start off with those workshops when we're consulting an organisation, be it big or small, we always try and get the input of different people. As I said, everybody has their different work schedule. Everybody has a certain time of the day that they can't necessarily allocate always because they're busy. That's where we need to be flexible as consultants and say, look, this is our assessment. And quite often we complete that. within our aspect of impact register, which sits quite often alongside a ISO 9001 integrated system, their business risk management. So delving into a bit of business continuity. We tend to align that with legal compliance. So that's where we first get a bit of aspects to impacts to legal requirements mapping. And then following those workshops and consultancy, we either offer that's a tool to people to say, look, this needs to be kept on top of and updated, or we bring their ideas and thoughts either annual review or those specific consultancy periods we offer for them to really inject their ideas or their changes into that register. So we've got some examples. So if I'm, let's just say a manufacturing organisation, how do I first go about identifying the aspects then? What would I do? Get my clipboard to walk around? How does that work? much, it's never a bad start. think it depends how comfortable I think workers are with having people walk around their environment. Obviously you don't want people changing what they do just because they see people. It comes back to that lead auditor training sometimes of you're walking into somebody's space, you need to be open with them and say, look, we're not assessing you, we're assessing the environment and how the organisation functions. And even then we're not assessing to find fault, we're assessing. to improve and establish this baseline. So I think exactly what you just said. Start by walking around and just listing things that you see happen. So it could be storage of material with a store of material. How finite is that resource? If you see services being offered by other companies on site or other organisations on site, write them down, see what they do, see if they have systems that match. So if they're another one of the ISO accredited top three. So 9, 14, 45, they're gonna have some awareness potentially of their organisation's management. And then consider when you take that all back to an office environment, what documentation is there along the lines of waste management that is gonna shed light on the organisation's impact that isn't directly visible? So where is a lot of this waste going? How are they segregated? Dealing with it is hazardous. Is it reusable? One of our engineering clients use a customer called, so use a company called Miwa Waste. Now they're specifically set up so that the rags are returned and it's a exchange service. Now Miwa has a strength in the fact that it's waste oil to the company, but actually it's a useful resource to Miwa because they can use it in a life cycle that allows them to generate energy and to reuse that oil at later date. So it's about also saying, right, what makes you different to potentially other organisations that can either shine through as a benefit of yourselves and your actions in the EMS or where are their potentials to develop and set objectives to become a more conscious waste producer. then me as an engineering company then so yeah rags yeah obviously we you cleaning things down wiping it down so you're saying that's an aspect yeah okay so how are we treating that and things like that and then I'm using energy I'm guessing with the machine raw material so those are the kind of things that you're looking for is it Yeah, and I think it's very easy to run away with this and say, look, we need to use less energy. We need to use less oil. We need to use less rags But actually, the first step of the EMS is nothing to do necessarily with becoming more environmentally friendly and more green energy focused or renewables energy focused. It's just about assessing where you are at that point in time and how well you manage your environment. that you are within. Now, some people will find themselves in the middle of an industrial estate that might have quite old facilities. Some people will find themselves maybe in some office blocks in the countryside, city centre. So it's really specific about assessing where are you and what is your environment, which obviously includes the people around you. So that's quite often noise pollution that might be overlooked. But also assessing that Everybody starts from somewhere and what start point are we currently at there then? Okay, so I'm not, when I'm first setting up my EMS system, then I'm not too worried about what happens. I'm more just interested in, for the aspects purposes, seeing what I'm actually doing. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, if we think about the plan Do check Act I think do can sometimes be phrased as what can we do to improve? But actually, if we consider it as a start point, do is quite often what are we already doing? And then that checking process is be an audit, be an informal work of consultation. It is that right, let's check actually how aligned are we already or what impact are we having on the environment? So I've done the machine, some of the machine, then I'll maybe walk into inspection and I'll do the same there. I'll just sort of say, okay, what are they doing in this environment? Yeah. so quite often inspection might be overlooked because it's not necessarily massively resource dependent in a physical resource. But what inspection quite often consumes is time. Its impact can quite often be light pollution, depending on where that office or inspection department is located to the outside world, because obviously We also have to consider inspection environment requirements. So it might be if you've got an integrated AS9100 system that we're really considering the temperature in that area. And the fact that if it's a hot day, we're pumping out a lot of cold air into that environment. Is that environment therefore a negative impact on the people within it? If we're going too cold, maybe, because there's a treatment involved somewhere along the line. So it's really about managing it on a area by area basis. So one organisation might not necessarily just have a list of aspects for that company. It may be that we divide that down again and say, look, this is an area that has more considerable actions or less significant impacts from those actions because they're managed well already. So we kind of list out each department, what each activity is and the aspects to that. OK, so we get a big long list. And then you mentioned there about significant aspects. What's that? So again, like all of the ISO systems, so the top three that I mentioned, 9, 14, 45, all require in their own way a risk assessment basically of these. So some sort of hierarchical assessment where we can say these are our most significant, these are the baseline ones. At JWA, we go with your standard five point system. We apply definitions and ratings to those based on likelihood severity and pretreatment, basically overall risk, and then post-control. What we're assessing when we look at the significant aspects or significant impacts is those involved in what we would refer to to clients as bet the farm, things that have such a great impact that they're going to impact. your daily production or your daily operations to an extent that would stop that and have an impact on the environment. But more simply put, your significant aspects are anything that would have an incredible impact on the environment or long lasting above those that you would see on a normal daily basis. So we're starting to think about the risk of arson, which may lead then to obviously air pollution or In worst case scenarios, obviously when the fire brigade turn up, there's the environmental assessment as to whether or not they can even wash away or use extinguishers with that fire because of the risk of runoff. So we have to consider really in those emergency scenarios, how significant is that impact of those actions on that one singular emergency events causation basically. So you're scoring each activity, is that what you're saying? We do, yes. So each aspect. So it might be that aspect is shared by a couple of activities. So activities might be very similar. So we might say actually the frequency and the likelihood of this risk is increasing. But quite often what we find most organisations classify their significant aspects or emergency aspects as are the ones that are hardest to deal with or may have a jump in severity. when they occur. Okay, so going back to the example then, I'm in a machine shop and I'm at a machine then, so I'm using energy, materials, I've got coolants or oils in the machines, obviously you said about the rags, so I have to determine each one just to see which one's bad or which one's good. not necessarily yourself, we all would always say to clients, look, you're here partially as an input to our process. So we might take that off your hands and say, look, this is where we think you are, get them to understand it, this is what we've got. But exactly what you're saying is right. We would normally list each one of those aspects one at a time to say, per process, this is what we've got. Now it might be we consolidate some of those together to make this a digestible. spreadsheet or digestible document because it's important that multiple people can understand it, not just one person we spend most of the time with. But exactly said the machine shop is going to have a visible waste streams or a visible activities list. But then when we come to the severe or the emergency aspects, we're saying, look, on any given day, if preparation fails, this could be an aspect such as machines that might cause a fire or that might fail in their bundling and spill into the environment, which is our impact we really need to focus on and prepare for. Okay, so we're not just looking at the day-to-day activities, we're looking at what can, if something goes wrong, what's that impact as well? exactly. And some of these might be significant aspects and significant impacts to consider. But we also have to look at the realistic nature of if these significant aspects occur, has the organisation or the environment the organisation's in got any natural or human made preparations built in? So when we think about intercepted drains, when we think about concrete hard standing floors, It might be this machine shop only has one entrance and exit where there's a roller door and there's a pedestrian entrance right next to it. So automatically the organisation has bought themselves some time and reduced that immediate impact. We're still going to acknowledge that the immediate impact could be coolant running out the door into protected area or into a river system. But the main thing we have to acknowledge is not everybody is the same. Some people might need. an increased level of defense for any of those impacts. But not everybody starts at the same position. So then would it sort of tie a little bit in with health and safety then? Let's just say we haven't got a fire alarm. If there's a fire, we're not going to be able to detect it. So the risk of environmental impact is greater. that? think you've just summed it up with word risk, really, which is there is always a level of tolerable risk an organisation can define. So if you haven't got a fire alarm that necessarily automatically detects or automatically warns, then we can start to review how the organisation alerts people if that's a standard old ringing bell. That's a start point and we can say, look, maybe an ongoing objective for continued improvement is we could invest or we could look at some form of heightened detection to "A" save the organisation some money, maybe bring down the immediate insurance costs. These are all often organisation benefits that are secondary to the environmental management system. But the core reasoning will always be risk tolerance. And that's where I think with the health and safety, the lines begin to blur because Often the legal compliance is shared. The level of depth may not always be there when we think about pre-use or the fire regulations in their specifics. You're not necessarily going to have an environmental auditor dive all the way down into your servicing records for everything, but there is an overall expectation for emergency preparedness based on those significant aspects. Okay, I understand. So when you're doing this identifying the significant bit, I think you mentioned legal as well. So if I'm, again, I'm just going to go to the machine shop bit, I'm at a machine. Do we look at which of those activities have got legislation attached to them and which haven't? So using metal hasn't got legislation. So possibly that's not as important where... Disposal of rags that has because of waste oil and things like that. So does that come into it then does it? we always try and package legal requirements to the organisation we're working with as a blanket. So if we're talking about waste, we do support them in saying, as you did with your oils, there are certain waste code for this oily rag But actually what we're saying is waste needs to be treated and waste needs to be treated in different ways. But actually your waste or scrap metals They can't just go on the back of the van. They need to go through the appropriate waste stream. And this is what that is. And those legal requirements, while we can break those down one by one, what we're actually as consultants trying to do is simplify that process and say, look, could I please see these waste transfer notes? Normally they are in the background of the organisation that looks after them, might not have been sent them or send them through to the client. We can then start over time educating or working with the client to help them understand how a new waste stream needs to be managed legally. So obviously we think about asbestos, there are certain unlicensed ways you can deal with asbestos. Quite often our advice to clients is leave it where it is or follow that legal compliance route. You've then also got your really simple waste like household, which has just seen a big change with the segregation of waste regs Again, we don't necessarily walk in the door and go, right, waste segregation regulations have just come out. They've just changed. need to do this, this, and this. We would say, look, have your waste management company approached you about how you're dealing with your office kitchen waste, how you're dealing with your food or recycling. How many employees do you have? Because actually, if you've got less than I think 12 currently or 15, you've got until 2027. We start that open discussion of them trying to understand what they do. And then we say to them, look, this is the condition set out by law. At a later date, we'll break down each niche aspect of it. But for now, this is what we need to reach out to organisations to do. Right, so you're saying if there's not legislation yet applicable to that activity, then it's not as important, so we don't worry about it just now. I would say they do need to worry about it, but it needs to be dealt with on a risk basis. So your first port of call should always be the highest risk to the environment that you're within. But also those controls that you're applying to that risk or the aspect and the consequential impact can quite often apply to the rest of the waste stream or the rest of the resource consumption. And that quite often as consultants, that might be something we don't necessarily engage with the client within because it's easier for them to understand a new way of their preferred working across the board for everything. Now, that doesn't mean one size fits all and one solution works for everything within the organisation, but it does mean that we can almost lift up that start point to say, this is how we deal with all of our waste now. It gets separated or it gets dealt with as hazardous. or somebody in the organisation needs to make a clear decision at this stage rather than every time a bit of waste is produced. So if I've gone through, I've identified all my activities, I've kind of identified which ones have got legal impacts, things like that. What about stakeholders like my customers? Is there a preference in there that, hang on, this is more important to our customers? that something that comes into it at all? So this is important to us, so we've got to address this. Yeah, I think part of that is the generation of this organisation's policy. So obviously attached to ISO 14001, we have the creation of an environmental management policy. Quite often that can be supported by sustainability, a life cycle of the product might be put forward within a policy. All of that has to obviously be addressed considering the direction of the culture and the direction of those stakeholders. It could be that they need to be involved. directly because the way they set up their involvement impacts as an aspect and an eventual impact. But it's also making sure that if this organisation is part of a group or this organisation has specific funding that we can try and recognize that within the overarching either customer or public facing documents to really try and present what we're doing and inform. that overarching might be a three year cycle of continuous improvement to begin. Okay, so I've identified the activities. We kind of identify which ones are significant. This one's important. What do I do then? Do we do anything with that information? I've days putting this together. We're bad at this. What do I do then? So I think there's always that ongoing formative gap analysis that is running in the back of an auditor or a consultant's mind. But generally ticking up a little list of things that we can improve or things that we can work on with the client. We can address those over time and we can start with those most significant. But also it's worth considering, do we need to do anything in preparation? because one of the key things to take away from an EMS is not just brilliant, we've got a gap analysis. This is how we're going to become legally compliant. It's how can we move forward over time to prepare for the next stage of our organisation, the next step in development? And then how can we apply systems in place already? Or how can we make sure when they're completed, we're not constantly reacting? So to answer your question, I think it becomes legal compliance and compliance to the environmental management processes and that quite often is the list of activities we need to do as an organisation to make sure it could be buying spill kits, it could be maybe changing supplier to somebody who has a better policy or more traceability of product that we're using. What we've then got is the forward planning where we can bring all of this and say actually we're going to use this new material, but is there a waste stream we can go down such as charitable donation to schools for WEEE waste? It might be waste to us, but actually is that computer, is that monitor really waste? So a couple of the confidential sites we work with, they obviously have to wipe things. Some things will get shredded because they're too confidential when it comes to electronic waste. But a large significant amount of their stuff gets donated once it's cleansed to make sure that they themselves aren't just managing sustainability, but they're actually benefiting an environment they are trying to choose. So I'm kind of focusing on trying to improve that activity and I had to reduce the risk and reduce the impact. Or the audit is only beneficial as long as we're not just correcting. It needs to come back to that whole CAPA environment of how we're going to prevent this. And then can that prevention help us prepare? So that would then reduce the significance, would it? And then, you know, and then we maybe focus on something else. Is that how that works? I'll agree to the first bit. Second bit will put a pin in. I think it can definitely reduce. There may be a level of underlying risk that never changes. And however often the organisation wished to do their management reviews, obviously a lot of people go with a significant yearly cycle, but some people choose to do every time they receive an internal audit, they have these micro management reviews that build up that process of review. can often allow for reduction in risk and then, okay, what's our next step to maintain this risk? So it's not necessarily a start-stop process for each risk. These are continual, going back to the Plan Do Check Act, continual preparations to reduce it and to continually reduce that over time, below that tolerable level often. And then, when you mentioned, is it time to move on to something else? I think that all depends on how much engagement with the environmental management system and organisation can resource really. Quite often we see a nice commitment from clients because they've paid for our services to put it frankly, to have us there on site, to have this ongoing support, which is a resource itself. And then when we think, okay, I'm not just coming in every day, I'm in and speaking to one individual person from this organisation. they've resourced me, people's times. Often they've resourced other, like we said, subcontractors, supporting processes that allow us to deal with more than one improvement pathway at a time. So I often think a good organisation doesn't just have processes, it has supportive systems along the side and by systems, it could be groups of people, could be teams. So one of our biggest clients currently, in Oldbury is going through an improvement to the producer packaging regulations. And part of our consultation with them is saying, look, we're going to put in all of this work to help get you on side with the tracking and the calculations of your refined contribution data. But we want to make this a system that works internally on its own so that these six people within the team can come together once a quarter. and get live reliable data. And that's where we said that risk is then reduced. Does that mean we leave that process? No, because another arching objective the management team have put in place is they're now reducing packaging required for that product line. Or even just on a customer by customer basis, can we divide that packaging? So maybe one. Large customer is happy with their PPE gloves to come without individual packaging separators. That's great. But that then means the small team need to acknowledge that and make sure their data is accurate. So it's always an ongoing process that allows us to maybe adjust the risk up with greater control or reduce the risk and still apply greater or more simplified controls. So it's not necessarily about moving on to something new. It's about often looking at the same aspect and impact in a new way. So it might be a gradual thing over months or years or something like that. Okay, so you don't have to fix everything at once. No, and as I said at the start as well, the standard wants you to work to be more environmentally friendly. But actually the start point of the EMS is understanding what you do and it's understanding your current management methods and getting to a baseline. So nobody is expecting you to go out and buy solar panels for your building. However, if that's a stage you want to take and it's a step that will allow you to then create a KPI based on energy usage that you can then track and develop and lower your risk of finite resource. Say you're off the grid, so you're heating oil tanks to run your offices. Then that is a process we can follow through, but it doesn't need to be a massive capital expenditure straight away. It doesn't even need to go to that stage. No, no, exactly. Okay, so as long as we're making some kind of improvement, it's going in the right direction. Yeah, it's a topic I know you like, the continuous versus continual improvement. We won't dive into that right now, but I think that it's always about putting the right foot forward. That doesn't necessarily always mean we're walking or running, but at least we can get that progress in a direction. So businesses change, they grow, we go in year on year out and things have changed. How do we make sure that we're keeping our aspects up to date? So this is the culture really, it's the culture of how engaged people are. If they're directly involved with the aspect impact register, it's how engaged they are with that. It's how engaged the members or the cycled through members of the management review are, because actually quite often that's the most documented point of the environmental management system for people to read through and understand. But I think there's always this reliance on You only know so much and we can't always rely on the consultant, as you've said, to come in at certain stages throughout the year. Give us this bit of education, obviously, because we're such nice consultants, we keep in contact with people all the time and say, just to let you know, this is on the horizon. But it's also about educating clients and saying, there are these websites you can go to and subscribe to a bit like UKAS do when there's an ISO change, they push out a little notification. often at midnight with a small notation change to a standard. that they can then become aware of and they can then monitor and say, this has changed, let's review it at this certain point within the year. Or quite often, it's that opening meeting where we say to top management or to the management representative, how's the year been? What are your most significant developments? Where do you see the cultural organisation taking its environmental management system with it? Or how has it had to adapt and change? And then It's the flow down. Yes, I suppose a new legislation comes in like the waste segregation that you mentioned and yeah that's one of those things that okay something's changed we now need to revisit our aspects and make sure it's still current and do we need to do anything. Yeah, and if you're doing non-destructive testing, so maybe you have a small x-ray unit on site, that's exactly like you said, that is where the health and safety lines get blurred. And arguably, our strength as a consultancy that manages health and safety as well to say, these are our legal requirements. You need to speak to these contractors or this governing body to register. And then that ball starts rolling because actually the environmental management system is going to support all of these other processes within your business around health and safety, around business continuity, around product quality that necessarily will allow a point of contact for all of those. So if you've got any success stories without breaking confidentiality where someone's really embraced environmental system aspects and impacts and really driven down their scores. Yeah, so I think probably comes back to this company in Oldbury that I was talking about where they are a massive distributor of personal protective equipment or uniforms. These are embroidered on site as well in cases and often through the supply chain, there is this accumulation of packaging that then they arrive with. And I think The management there, also supervisors and key staff within those departments have shown a huge culture shift. alongside a rebranding and a change to the organisation. But actually it's been really employee driven and management driven to get to this point where they're now using less packaging on a customer by customer basis. And they're reaching out to them all and saying, look, you are a customer. How can we improve or how can we reduce this packaging without altering your service? And it's really bespoke. And it was one of the parts of praise we had on a supplier audit from their customer in which they remarked. The legal awareness around forever chemicals that are starting to trickle down the supply chain is already starting to be thought about with their design team. But actually the tailoring to themselves as a customer, then also compared with other customers is brilliant to see, especially when you start then thinking about how we're dealing with waste as a whole. Okay, that's good. Interesting. So are there any tools or resources you can recommend for people to embark on this journey that might make their life easier? Other than ourselves, I think the government website is immediately helpful when it comes to the legislative side and making sure you've got the most up-to-date resources. I would always tell people never be afraid to make your own spreadsheet that helps you visualize and manage all of these things. Obviously, that's where we come from in the background, making sure we have a good knowledge base. I think there's one key system. that I've engaged with, that a customer already had that's been very helpful, which was my compliance. It does have a few areas for development and continual improvement, but actually this system, once somebody has been into it and selected the correct legislation that is required, both for environmental and health and safety, will keep that up to date and will notify you as of when that changes. Another one that we've come across is obviously more well known, I'd argue, is the BrightSafe system. Mainly BrightSafe. Yeah, so that's often quite the package with BrightHR, BrightPay. BrightSafe is slightly more weighted than my compliance towards health and safety, but it's probably one of the easiest cost management tools I've found so far that clients have already been using. So really, Similar to my compliance, Bright Safe allows you to break down an easy distributable cost assessment to all workers that may need it. Whereas my compliance is a benefit because actually you just upload your medical safety data sheet and it will tell you exactly what the key management methods are, disposal methods, transport methods, storage methods that are specific to this. My compliance saves more time. BrightSafe maybe makes it a bit easier to distribute that knowledge. and I'll look them up, I'll learn about those ones. Okay, brilliant. So how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn a bit more? First thing I would say is our website, JWA Management Consulting, all of the contact details are on there, including a nice list of our clients. Not the biggest clients we have, not the smallest clients we have, it's a nice mix. We're quite honest in who we work for if people ask, but more than happy to reach out for references. Under each client, we have a list of what standards we support them in, or necessarily what consultancy they use us for if it's not a standard. I would then also say while I'm not on LinkedIn all the time, I quite often try and post a nice, concise and concentrated post every now and then when I think I have something useful to say. Other than that, we're always around for a phone call, even if it's just reaching out to say, look, I've seen your podcast or I've seen you're on the Auva registered consultants webpage. Can we have a quick conversation about what's needed? not necessarily even the financial side, just how much of a mountain is this to climb? Or are we ready to engage in that process yet? Brilliant. We will put the links in the show notes so people can get to it. Brilliant. Okay. Appreciate your time Alex. I'll let you get on with your day. Pleasure, you too, speak to you soon.

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Michael Venner

Host
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Alex Holford

Guest