A quantitative approach to prioritizing environmental impacts in a manufacturing and non-manufacturing facility

The Focus of the Environmental Management System, ISO14001, is to identify the environmental aspects of an organization's activities, products or services and to determine those which are significant. This paper describes the methodology developed to prioritize the environmental aspects of two manufacturing and two design sites of Lucas Automotive Electronics. The methodology is based around a number of criteria looking at process toxicity to environmental media and its impact on business performance. Each section of the criteria has a risk rating of High, Medium, Low scoring 3, 2 or 1, giving the total for each process as to the likelihood of a negative environmental occurrence and to the severity of that occurrence. Examples of this have been taken from the work performed at the four sites.