Evaluation of operational environmental performance: an engineering-based approach

The corporate sector is increasingly required to understand and manage the environmental consequences of their activities by the use of Environmental Management Systems (EMSs). A diverse range of EMSs have been proposed in the literature. These methods have been reviewed and assessed in this paper according to their suitability for evaluation of operational environmental performance. Existing methods present limitations in accommodating changes in environmental performance, and do not incorporate fundamental process analysis to assess how the actual performance varies from what is theoretically achievable. A novel engineering-based risk evaluation framework is proposed to overcome some of the identified issues.