Environmental Management: Principles and practice

BOX 4.1 Types of eco-audit
♦ Site or facility audit a company or body audits to see how it conforms to
safety and other regulations and care for the environment.
♦ Compliance audit to assess whether regulations are being heeded and/or
policy is being followed.
♦ Issues audit assessment of the impact of a company’s or other body’s
activities on a specific environmental or social issue, e.g. rainforest
loss (Grayson, 1992: 40).
♦ Minimization audit to see if it is possible to reduce: waste; inputs; emission
of pollutants (including noise); energy consumption, etc.
♦ Property transfer audits (pre-acquisition audit, merger audit, disvestiture
audit, transactional audit, liability audit) —a company or body audits prior
to disvestiture, takeover, joint venture, alliance, altering a lease, sale of assets,
etc., to show if there are any problems such as contaminated land.
♦ Waste audits to see if regulations are met, whether costs can be reduced by
sale of by-products, etc. (Ledgerwood et al., 1992; Thompson and Wilson,
1994). The motivation to audit may be to comply with legislation or come
from a desire to prevent problems.
♦ Life-cycle assessment/analysis evaluation that can extend beyond the time
horizon of a single owner, company or government (it is cradle-to-grave),
e.g. impacts of something from manufacture, through use to disposal (Fava,
1994; British Standards Institution, 1994c).
Note: Even within a single company eco-audit must check for variation from
unit to unit and allow for change that takes place as plant ages. Eco-audit may
extend to checking environmental impacts of suppliers, subsidiaries, use and
disposal of products and packaging.

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STANDARDS AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
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In the UK the first eco-audit by a local authority took place in 1989 (Kirklees
District Council, assisted by Friends of the Earth). Roughly 87 per cent of UK local
government authorities had used eco-audit or planned to by 1991, encouraged by
the UK 1990 Environmental Protection Act (Grayson, 1992:50). Unfortunately, some
of the eco-audits produced little more than publicity documents.
There is considerable overlap between eco-audit and health and safety
management—some countries now test the environmental quality of new buildings
to ensure that they do not harm employees, that they use eco-friendly construction
materials and do not waste energy. Energy efficiency and better employment
conditions mean savings on power bills and less absenteeism.
Barton and Bruder (1995:xv) see local eco-audit as a key measure in the delivery
of sustainable development as ‘a process for establishing what sustainable
development means in practice—how to interpret it locally, how to test whether you
are achieving it’. They recognized two components in eco-audit: (1) external—
collation of available data to produce a state-of-the-environment report, and (2)
internal—the state-of-the-environment report as a foundation for efforts to assess
policies and practices (Barton and Bruder, 1995:12). First-time audits are usually
more complex than follow-up audits.
Various bodies and companies publish eco-audit guidelines or manuals which
can help other auditors, and there is also use of computers, expert systems and
information technology (retrieval systems like LEXIS conceptual, or hypertext
searching). However, guidelines and computer aids are not enough: effective
environmental management demands commitment. Some companies, authorities
and educational establishments have tried to do eco-auditing on the cheap, which
tends to give inadequate results. Doing this also poses risks from institutional
politics—e.g. ministries may compete; companies may be rivals; internal squabbles
may distort things.
Once standards like BS 7750 improve and spread, together with better training
and accreditation of auditors, these problems should be reduced (Buckley, 1995:
292–293; Gleckman and Krut, 1996). The standards that have so far evolved mainly
relate to developed countries, and require modification for use in poorer countries.
There is also a need for internationally recognized standards (or even a single world
standard) for eco-audit. Worries have been voiced that some standards are determined
more by politics, special-interest groups and public opinion than by objective science
(Ludwig et al., 1992; Rensvik, 1994; Reisenweber, 1995). Box 4.2 presents some
eco-audit-environmental management system standards.