Ensuring Compliance and Continuous Improvement in Environmental Management

An organization should establish a process to evaluate the extent to which its compliance obligations are fulfilled, by monitoring, measuring, analyzing and reviewing its performance against its compliance obligations. This process can help the organization demonstrate its commitment to fulfil compliance obligations, understand its compliance status, reduce the potential for regulatory violations and avoid adverse action from its interested parties.

Performance against all compliance obligations should be evaluated periodically, although the frequency and the timing of each can differ depending on:

• The organization’s legal requirements.
• Relevance of other requirements adopted as compliance obligations.
• Changes to the compliance obligations.
• The organization’s past performance relating to a compliance obligation, including the potential adverse effects associated with non-compliance.
• Expected variations in performance of a process or activity, e.g. the performance of a waste water treatment plant can vary depending on the volume of waste water received.

Evaluation of compliance should be an iterative process which uses the output from other areas of the environmental management system to determine whether the organization is fulfilling its compliance obligations. Methods used for evaluation of compliance can include gathering information and data, for example through:

• Facility tours or inspections.
• Direct observations or interviews.
• Project or work reviews.
• Review of sample analysis or test results, and comparison to regulatory limits.
• Verification sampling or testing.
• Review of legally required documented information (e.g. hazardous waste manifests, regulatory submittals).

Internal audits can be used to determine the effectiveness of the process(es) established and implemented to evaluate fulfillment of compliance obligations, but they cannot be used to demonstrate that the organization’s compliance obligations have been fulfilled. However, auditing techniques can be applied by the organization to evaluate the fulfilment of its compliance obligations.

Compliance obligations can be taken into account in a variety of environmental management system processes, such as:

• Determination of significant environmental aspects and risks and opportunities that need to be addressed.
• Planning of actions.
• Establishing environmental objectives.
• Development of processes for awareness, external communication, operational planning and control, and monitoring and measurement.

The effectiveness of these processes and the results achieved can also provide evidence of fulfilment of compliance obligations.

The organization can choose to review reports and communication provided by interested parties (eg. regulatory site inspection reports or customer audits), or communicate with interested parties specifically in relation to its compliance obligations.

Where a failure or potential failure to fulfil a compliance obligation is identified, the organization should take action. The organization’s non-conformity and corrective action process could be used to deal with needed corrections. Where appropriate and as required, the organization should communicate or report on failure to fulfil a compliance obligation to the relevant interested party / parties.

A non-compliance is not necessarily elevated to a management system non-conformity if, for example, it is identified and corrected by the environmental management system processes.

By evaluating compliance, the organization gains knowledge and understanding of its compliance status. The frequency of compliance evaluations should be appropriate to keep this knowledge and understanding up to date. Evaluations should be conducted in a manner that provides timely input to the management review so that top management can review the organization’s fulfillment of its compliance obligations and maintain awareness of the organization’s compliance status.

The organization should retain documented information as evidence of its evaluation of compliance. This could include:

• Reports of the results of compliance evaluations.
• Internal and external audit reports.
• Internal and external communications and reports.