Environmental Management System

Civil consumption demands have led to massive resource consumption and CO2 emissions, exacerbating climate change and intensifying extreme climate conditions and natural disasters. Several environmental management methods have been developed and devised to mitigate environmental issues. The environmental problems must be solved through the integration of knowledge from multiple disciplines. Three basic levels of thinking are: systemic thinking, life cycle thinking, and management thinking. The goal of management is to create efficiency and value by improving the resource efficiency and environmental quality. The plan–do–check–act (PDCA) cycle, a commonly employed method for environmental management, emphasizes iterative processes, in which each assessment result informs goal and procedure correction before the subsequent PDCA cycle, generating continual performance improvements. ISO 14001 Environmental Management System (EMS) has been developed to provide enterprises with an environmental assessment method to protect and improve the natural environment while accommodating social needs and economic development. There are seven stages in the EMS: context of the organization, leadership, planning, support, operation, performance evaluation, and improvement. One useful approach to evaluate the environmental performance is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), an approach to consider the resource and energy input and output in the entire product life cycle, and the environmental impact incurred from each stage in the life cycle. Goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, environmental impact assessment, and interpretation, comprise the framework of LCA. The assessment results are further analyzed, and suggestions are formulated to improve unit processes that incur the most severe environmental impact, thereby mitigating the environmental impact of the production life cycle.