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Environmental Management Systems: An Implementation Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Organizations

Many changes were made in this edition of the Guide to improve its usefulness and to reflect EMS
experience gained over the last four years The changes were based on feedback solicited from
selected users of the first edition of the Guide, lessons learned and implementation examples from the
NSF/EPA projects, the Multi-State Working Group, Guide users, and Technical Committee 207-Small
and Medium-Sized Enterprise efforts. In particular, the authors have provided additional information on
certain EMS elements that many organizations have found to be particularly challenging – including
environmental aspects, communications and operational controls, among others. Sections 3 through 5
have been reconfigured into a new “Ready-Set-Go” format. The new Section 5 (GO!) has been added
to provide a “roadmap” or logical sequence for implementing the key elements of an EMS. In addition,
pollution prevention success stories and examples of EMS implementation practices from public sector
and service based-organizations have been added to help demonstrate the value of EMS.
This Guide is designed primarily for use by EMS implementers — the people in a small or medium-
sized organization that lead the EMS development effort. The heart of the Guide is found in Section 4,
“Key Elements of an EMS.” For each of the key EMS elements, this section describes the importance of
the element, how to get started on implementation, and other key suggestions. In this edition,
worksheets have been added to help users “capture their learning” as they progress from one EMS
element to the next. Readers of the Guide can use these worksheets to summarize and evaluate their
existing management processes, to initiate needed improvements and to help maintain implementation
momentum.
The Guide continues to use the ISO 14001 standard as one important EMS model. ISO 14001,
published in November 1996, is the most widely accepted international standard for EMS. EPA, as part
of its effort to promote the use of EMS’s that can help organizations improve environmental performance
(including compliance) and make greater use of pollution prevention approaches, is implementing
several EMS initiatives that might be useful to some organizations. These include the National
Environmental Performance Track, the EMS Initiative for Local Governments and the Design for
Environment EMS Guide. Information on the National Environmental Performance Track program and
other Federal and state-level EMS initiatives can be found in Appendix B and other relevant sections of
this Guide.
While this Guide is intended primarily for organizations outside the Federal government, some Federal
agencies are developing EMS’s at their facilities. These agencies may wish to use this Guide to support
their EMS efforts.