Environmental aspects and impacts: making the register useful

Most environmental aspects registers I’m handed have the same problem. They’re a list of everything, which makes them a list of nothing.

Every possible interaction the business has with the environment, all sat in one spreadsheet, all weighted about the same. Waste, water, noise, emissions, spills, packaging, energy. Forty-odd rows, scored, filed, and never opened again until the auditor asks.

A list isn’t a decision

The register isn’t the point. It’s the working out. What it’s supposed to produce is a short answer to one question: of everything this business does, what actually matters environmentally, and what are we doing about those things?

If your register can’t answer that in a couple of sentences, it isn’t earning its keep, however thorough it looks.

Sort by what you control

The thing that makes a register useful is separating what you can actually change from what you can’t.

Your electricity has a carbon impact. So does every business’s. Unless you’re in a position to do something about how much you use or where it comes from, scoring it out of five each year doesn’t get you anywhere. But the skip out the back that goes to landfill three-quarters full of stuff that could’ve been segregated? That’s yours. You can move that this month.

We redesigned waste at Envirovue on exactly that basis. Not by scoring everything more carefully, but by looking hard at the handful of things that were genuinely in the business’s gift to change.

Go and look at it

You can’t write a decent aspects register at a desk. Walk the site. Follow a delivery in and follow the waste out. Look in the bins, honestly. Ask the people doing the job where the mess goes and what gets tipped down which drain.

I’ve had registers handed to me that never mentioned a process that was quietly the biggest thing on site, because whoever wrote it worked from a template rather than a walk round.

Ask what happens when things go wrong as well. Where does it end up if a drum splits, or a bund fills with rainwater, or nobody’s emptied the interceptor since before you started? Abnormal conditions and emergencies belong in there every bit as much as the day-to-day running, and they’re usually the ones that’ll put you in front of the Environment Agency.

Then let it change something

A register that’s identical to last year’s is telling you either nothing changed or nobody looked. New machine, new contract, new material, new waste stream, they all move the picture. So does a change in the law.

And when something ranks high, it should turn into an objective with a name and a date on it. Otherwise you’ve built a very tidy document that describes your environmental problems in detail and does nothing about any of them, which is worse than not having one, because now you’ve written down that you knew.