Environmental Aspects

​The organisation must demonstrate conformance to the requirement by demonstrating that it manages’ all environmental aspects which are significant to the organisation’s processes or activities. 
The Standard does not stipulate any one particular method of evaluating the aspect’s significance; what one organisation may consider as significant to them may not be considered as significant to another.

What does not need to be done!
Your organisation is not required to: -

• Carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment to determine which environmental impacts are significant;
• Taking a lifecycle approach does not need a full life-Cycle-Analysis to be carried out.

 
What needs to be done!
When determining the environmental aspects the organisation needs to consider its size, its scope and the activities / processes carried out e.g. a construction company working on land close to an area of scientific interest will have a higher ‘risk’ that there activities will impact on the neighbouring land(s); whilst an office environment say Accountants, then the office based activities will have less environmental impact on the environment. 
However, in each example the following need to be considered: -

• The operating conditions 
• Past activities
• Planned activities

 
Typical Aspects can include: -

• Release to groundwater
• Release to surface water
• Emission to air
• Waste management 
• Energy use
• Use of natural resources

 
When determining the environmental impact of each of the identified aspects consider:
•           Existing controls
•           Severity of the impact
•           Frequency or probability of occurrence
•           Duration of the impact
•           Effect on public image
•           Cost of changing the impact
•           Difficulty of changing the impact
•           Effect of change on other activities or processes
•           Concerns over potential regulatory or legal exposure
•           Concerns of interested parties
 
Your organisation may wish to take into consideration (and determine) the impacts of the activities on, local, regional, national or global scale. 
 
To conform to the requirements of 6.1.2 the significant aspects need to be documented (hardcopy or electronically), this is usually in the form of an aspects register.