Re: ISO 14001 Aspect and Impact Assessment - Direct and Indirect Environmental Impact
Gone through the blog, and I am not really in agreement with the reasoning in general on indirect aspects.
Taking Energy as an example, in the USA you can opt to buy energy from CO2 neutral sources such as Nuclear, Geothermal or Solar Sources (including Hydroelectric and Wind), which even though more expensive, is a remedy for the emission, so yes... you can do something about it. If this is an expensive solution then at least try to offset this by planting some trees... so there again... you can do something about it!
Saying that nothing can be done unless you pull the plug (which is generally not an option if you want to remain in business) is an excuse in my opinion!
As an external auditor, I would pick on a customer who reasons in this manner!
From MALTA (Europe)
Going back to Randy Stewart's post you referred, there are two points that I would like to highlight, first the standard is very much explicit in its requirements w.r.t identifying environmental aspects, i.e.
a) "to identify the environmental aspects of its activities, products and services within the defined scope of the environmental management system that it can control and those that it can influence...."
So, anything that falls outside the scope of the EMS, may not necessarily be identified or taken into account.
It further states that
only the significant environmental aspects are taken into account while establishing the EMS, setting policies, objectives, allocation of resources and all other associated things for that matter. It also implies that
if any of the identified aspects is significant (either direct or indirect), it must form part of your EMS and accordingly there must be some controls in place. If you can't control the impacts, it isn't significant for you. The one who can control it should consider it significant at the first place. And if someone else has already considered it significant and subsequently controlled it, the question is - why should you or me now bother about it?
Secondly, as far as carbon offsetting goes, I don't think tree plantation is a supportive solution especially looking at the huge volume of CO2 emitted in power generation and the volume of CO2 that can be offset by trees given the fact that a mature tree, on an average, can absorb just 1 - 1.5 tonnes of CO2 during it's entire life span (say 40 - 50 years) whereas the conventional coal fired boilers result in emissions of the order of >1000 gm CO2 eq. per kWh of electricity. However, the generating station can well control it by, e.g. switching over to biomass or other renewable energy sources.
Just a food for thought.
I learned a long time ago that it's not a good idea to piss off a Marine!!!!!
