Environmental Management? There's no Such Thing!!
- by Nigel George. First published: 10th February 2009
As business managers, we tend to look at the concept of 'environmental management’ similar to the overarching concept of 'business management’, but this is a dangerous path to take as it places the environment into a set of processes, boundary conditions and set cause/effect relationships that can somehow be 'managed’.
Key Points
- You can’t manage the environment, you can only manage your impact on the environment.
- Managing your impact is simple – Use less. Waste less.
- You don’t need to make big changes – often it is the simple stuff that makes the biggest difference.
Managing the Environment?
The traditional 'command and control’ managerialist approach has been an abject failure in managing our impact on the natural environment. Traditional management has tended to view the natural environment as a set of resources to be used for production. As such, an optimisation approach ? where decisions are made based on maintaining some optimal state has been used in managing many resources in isolation to the surrounding natural systems. Traditional management also tends to use set decision-making processes that assume that changes will be incremental and linear over time.
Unfortunately, in the real world, there is no optimal state for any natural resource ? and the interlinking and interdependent nature of human and natural systems has led to traditional management approaches being inadequate at best and prone to failure.
So the idea of managing the environment really is an oxymoron – a contradiction – and we should instead focus on how we as businesses interact with the environment.
Now it would be easy at this point to disappear off into a complex dissertation of 'best practices’, 'direct/indirect impacts’ and 'life-cycle assessment’, but you as the Daily Pragmatist need something simple – something you can act on.
So, tipping our hats to Ockham1, here’s an alternative definition of 'Environmental Management’:
Use less. Waste less.
Managing our Environmental Impact
The two biggest interractions your business will have with the environment is in what you consume and what you waste. Consumption can be all forms of energy, fuels, raw materials, component parts, plant and equipment. Waste is everything you won’t be using any more.
How these things are employed and consumed in your business not only governs your effect on the environment, but also governs your bottom line. It is a simple fact that any good that is energy/material intensive and/or produces a proportionately higher amount of waste is going to cost more as time goes on.
What is great about looking at environmental management in this way is that it now fits neatly back into our concept of business management – we can establish processes, set boundary conditions and see cause/effect relationships in a way that we can do something about as business managers.
It does also avoid another major trap in the journey to being more sustainable – it does not see the 'environment’ as something different, or outside the business – it is an integral part of how you run your business.
Now this might all seem blindingly obvious – but time and again it is the simplest, most obvious things that get overlooked. Before getting caught up in any grand plans, start with the simple stuff. You might be suprised at just how much of a difference you can make.
Taking Action
- Tally up all your energy bills for the last year (electricity, fuels, gas etc.) – count units not dollars.
- Get you internal technical staff, or a suitably qualified person to compile data on what each item of plant and equipment consumes. It does not have to be super accurate at this stage – normally you will find some big, obvious consumers.
- Count your inputs – break them up into those related directly to your goods/services and put the rest in a second list.
- Attack the second list first – these are your expenses that are not related to cost of goods/services and will have the least impact on your service provision, so be ruthless in minimising waste in these areas.
- Be more cautious with your first list – you don’t want to drop quality of output. Check alternative suppliers, trial different production/service delivery methods etc.
- Last, but certainly not least – get your staff involved. There is money to be made/saved just by listening to your people. They are your front line and in the best position to tell you where you can do better.
1As in 'Sir William’ of Ockham’s Razor (the simplest answer is most often the best) fame.
