Managing the Environment

Managing the Environment

‘Managing The Environment’ was originally written to cover the IOSH (Institution of Occupational Health & Safety) course 'Managing Environmental Responsibilities'. It provides underpinning knowledge to the NEBOSH (National Examination Board in Occupational Safety & Health) Environmental courses, The British Safety Council Diploma in Environmental Management and the IEMA (Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment) Associate Certificate. It has a UK bias but is useful for international versions of the above courses.

Copyright A J Clark BSc CFIOSH AIEMA Cert who claims his moral rights herewith.

Smashwords edition May 2014

A book is basically out of date before it is written but was accurate at May 2014. Most of the technical content changes but slowly but legal content is always being revised. Any errors or omissions are entirely my responsibility.

Thanks to many persons who encouraged this book and particularly Steve Pace, Courses Director, Dept for Chemistry in Industry, Hull University.

ISBN 0 9535772 0 1

Disclaimer

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure accuracy and that the text is up to date, neither the publisher nor the authors accept legal liability for its contents. Specialist advice should always be sought, especially in legal matters!

Contents

Introduction

Aims

Chapter1 environmental issues in perspective

Chapter 2 Dynamics of environmental pollution

Chapter 3 Some kinds of pollutants and their specific problems

Chapter 4 Waste

Chapter 5 Water pollution

Chapter 6 Air pollution

Chapter 7 Surveying the environment

Chapter 8 Energy management

Chapter 9 Managing the working environment

Chapter 10 Industry specific issues

Chapter 11 The way forward

Appendix A List of Acronyms

Appendix B Internet links

Appendix C Useful sources of information

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Other titles by this author

Introduction

Welcome to ‘Managing the Environment’. I hope that it will influence your way of thinking, even your way of life, both at home and at work.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, all the indicators of environmental crisis have pointed to the 21st Century. I can recall an illustrated World Atlas in 1950 which included a demographic section, projected forward to the year 2000, where it stopped with every graph either going steeply upwards (population) or else going steeply downwards (everything else). Now we have arrived and are fourteen years beyond! Unhappily, it is only in recent years that we have begun to take the situation with the seriousness which it merits and to seek to place control in the only hands which can really do anything about it all, namely managers.

It is worth here quoting from ‘Our Common Future’, the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development published in April 1987:

‘Most of today’s decision makers will be dead before the planet suffers the full consequences of acid rain, global warming, ozone depletion, widespread desertification, and species loss. Most of today’s young voters will still be alive.’

The World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, was set up as an independent body in 1983 by the United Nations. Its brief was to re-examine the critical environment and development problems on the planet and to formulate realistic proposals to solve them and to ensure that human progress will be sustained through development without bankrupting the resources of future generations:

‘Our Common Future serves notice that the time has come for a marriage of economy and ecology, so that governments and their people can take responsibility not just for environmental damage, but for the policies that cause the damage. Some of these policies threaten the survival of the human race. They can be changed. But we must act now.

Alas, all the indicators now point towards global warming of up to 6oC, an earlier and agreed target of 2.1oC seems to have been abandoned as the world’s leaders are distracted by financial crisis. A World Bank scientific report (Nov 2012) says , even at 4oC"triggering a cascade of cataclysmic changes that include extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks and a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people’

This book will chart the responses which are being made to that challenge, and it is a picture which, although depressing at times, still takes the perspective that disaster is not inevitable, even though it is most urgent that we globally take sufficient steps pretty well immediately.

It is expected that you already do the things a good citizen should do. I am sure that you use recycling facilities, make prudent decisions about energy consuming plant such as motor cars and heating systems, and that you attend to the insulation of your house. This book is intended to take you far beyond that point, it is to empower you so that you can play your vital part in doing just that, managing the environment.

A book is out of date, usually before it is even written. In the field of environmental management, that is particularly so. Legislation and practice change with bewildering speed in response to the ever evolving pressures upon our planet and our home. Whist I have attempted to keep things current, they will inevitably date.

Most of the technical content remains current and changes only relatively gradually, so that hopefully this work will continue to be informative for some time to come!

Aims

The aim of ‘Managing the Environment’ is to help to empower you so that you are enabled to further the cause of environmental management. Whatever roles and functions you undertake in your working life, you should perceive also within their environmental context and thus help to ‘spread the message’ and promote a positive environmentalist culture within your workplace. Environmental Management has tended to grow out of Health & Safety Management and the philosophies and practice of both disciplines have much in common, so that hopefully you will be able to contribute towards an integrated safe, healthy & environmentally positive ‘SHE’ management structure.

Objectives

Each chapter will have a set of objectives defined and these are expressed in terms of learning outcomes.

Pre-knowledge

The book is written for persons working at management or supervisory level, or those who advise and work with managers, for example workers' representatives and health & safety practitioners. It is intended that the content will be sufficient as a starting point to take you into any environmental management matter. Although there is considerable technical content, as well as the legal and managerial component, you should not be daunted by this. Environmental science is a huge multi-disciplinary area and you should be able to seek and get technical support for anything you need. The managerial role is central and therefore crucial; if you have an understanding of the process of management then you are well on your way.

Qualifications

This book substantially covers the syllabi for the following qualifications:

The NEBOSH Certificate in Environmental Management

IOSH ‘Managing Environmental Responsibilities’

It also fulfils the criteria of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) Foundation, and goes a long way towards those of the IEMA Associate Certificate.

If you wish to make further professional advancement in Environmental Management, an obvious route is by taking either the IEMA Associate Certificate giving Associate Member status of the institute and the designation AIEMA as also is the alternative NEBOSH Environmental Diploma or IEMA Diploma. Postgraduate courses which contain an Environmental Management component (for example, the University of Portsmouth MSc in Occupational Health and Safety Management and Environmental Management) meet the same learning outcomes.

You are advised to make contact with IEMA to explore your professional development options more fully.

Sources of Information

This is the age of the information explosion. In any subject or discipline the body of knowledge and information is ever growing and, it seems, at an accelerating pace. Worse still, everything changes with time so that keeping informed and up to date is an on-going need and requires us all to make an effort to keep up. Environmental management is amongst the fastest growing and developing areas, driven by a plethora of new legislation and the activities of the Government and Non-Governmental Organisations (GOs and NGOs).

I have found those listed in Appendix C to be particularly fruitful sources of information.

Publications.

Database systems are available on CD ROM, which offer easy access to a large core of health, safety and environmental information. They are too expensive for individual purchase but many organisations subscribe to one or other of them (see Bibliography).

The Internet provides a modern on-line search facility which is cheaply available and seems set to become the universal means of obtaining information about anything. Some websites which you are advised to visit are listed in Appendix B:

Chapter 1 Environmental Issues in Perspective

Objectives

1 To appreciate how concerns for the global environment are developing into a legal and managerial framework intended to take the world forward to a position of sustainable development.

2..Be able to chart the progress at world level by protocols, conventions and treaties and how this has been translated into action within the European Parliament.

3..Know in outline how European Directives and Regulations are translated into UK law as Acts of Parliament and subordinate Regulations.

4 Know the main provisions of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and other relevant legislation in outline.

5 Appreciate who are the main stakeholders and who does what in terms of protecting the environment.

1.1 Ethics

There can be no doubt that mankind faces threat to its very survival if we do not manage to come to terms with his environment. Concepts such as 'global warming', 'depletion of the ozone layer', 'acid rain', 'increasing ocean levels as the Poles begin to melt', 'desertification' and 'species loss' have moved from matters of scientific debate into harsh realities which we all must now acknowledge. We travel together on the 'Good Ship Earth' and whether we do it as first class passengers (the 'Developed' Nations) or as 'steerage' (the so called 'Developing World') we all stand to metaphorically drown if we 'do a Titanic'.

If you search online the phrase ‘The Earth is Full’, you will arrive at a ‘TED’ talk by Paul Gilding (he has also written ‘The Great Disruption’) presenting a view forward of imminent radical change in environmental management.

A definition of the environment which will serve was used in the 1990 UK Government White Paper, 'This Common Inheritance' (J. S. Mill):

'Is there not the Earth itself, its forests and waters, above and below the surface? These are the inheritance of the human race What rights, and under what conditions, a person shall be allowed to exercise over any portion of this common inheritance cannot be left undecided. No function of government is less optional than the regulation of these things, or more completely involved in the idea of a civilised society.'

'This Common Inheritance' passed through parliament as the 'Green Bill' and eventually became the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

However, NEBOSH (National Examination Board in Occupational Safety & Health) prefer:

the surroundings* in which an organisation operates, including air, water, land, natural resources, flora, fauna, humans and their inter-relation

* surroundings can extend from within an organisation to the global system

The problems of environmental degradation are inextricably linked with those of population growth (6.91 billion at 2010). Although in terms of actual numbers, undeveloped countries are increasing their populations more rapidly, per capita consumption is something like 400 times less than that in the developed world. The Northern Hemisphere contains most of the developed nations and so in environmental terms the N/S divide is arguably more important than E/W.

1.2 Realities Coming Home to Roost?

India’s population is set to exceed that of China within a generation, and both these countries are seen as having ‘tiger’ economies as they raise their standards of living. Their increased demand for basic resources is one of the main reasons why we have reached the point of permanent oil shortage. Prices have risen from $50 a barrel to $120 in a decade and it is unlikely that they will ever go down again to former levels. As the UK has exhausted its offshore oil and gas reserves, the state of Qatar has been contracted to supply 25% of our gas needs for the next 25 years. LNG tankers (brightly coloured red and highly visible!) now discharge into our existing gas pipe network at Milford Haven and grain.

From gathering, through liquefaction, transportation and evaporation some 30% of the energy is lost. Pipelines are inherently more efficient but more vulnerable to supply interruption.

Our unquenchable love affair with the motor car continues. One unexpected side effect of this is the 16 square miles of London suburban gardens which have disappeared under hard cover, increasing water runoff and flash flooding at a time when violent storms are perceived to be on the increase! Not only have we more vehicles, we have larger ones. The response to the infinitely tedious (and largely unproven) use of speed humps has lead to a renaissance of the Land Rover as being more comfortable in which to ride over them. Bigger vehicles, less fuel economy, more expensive in their manufacture! It is truly a kind of madness.

The awful destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina as its poorly maintained levees collapsed, point both to increasingly violent weather and rising water levels worldwide. It is difficult to decide whether a weather event is due to global climate change or just part of the ‘normal’ range, but scientific opinion now firmly says that it is so. Fist-sized hailstones destroying the roofs of houses in a small village in the Black Forest (29th July 2005) can probably be dismissed as an ‘act of a rather angry God’, but the storm of 1996 which devastated the region, bringing down huge swathes of trees is less easy to dismiss. Southeast England also, it should be remembered had its own hurricane in 1987 which destroyed five million trees. That trees are linked to climate was unusually demonstrated in Qatar, when the winter of 2004/5 was the worst in living memory. It rained! There has been a mass tree planting there to conceal the US airbase from which much of the ‘shock and awe’ was inflicted on Iraq.

And the species decline ever continues. We now speak of a mass extinction comparable at least to the Permian in which about 70% of all species disappeared. It is happening now and the effects are irreversible.

Destruction of forests has gone on since man learned how to fell trees. Burning down woodlands also has enjoyed a long history. The island of Madeira was wantonly torched in order to make it more habitable and the same sort of approach is still practiced in Borneo. Recent studies suggest that wetland drainage and agricultural activity, slash and burn methods, are likely to completely destroy the peat reserves there, releasing vastly more CO2 than the Kyoto summit was ever pledged to contain. These events and many others (such as the desertification of much of Spain) lend urgency to the need to work for sustainable development.

1.3 Towards Environmental Management

Awareness of the environment as endangered by the activities of man is perhaps epitomised by Rachael Carson's book, 'Silent Spring', which pointed up the dangers of chemicals and pesticides spreading through and polluting the environment, with unforeseen, unpredictable and therefore potentially