Identifying how your organisation's activities, products and services might affect the environment

Our guidance by business sector is a useful starting point to highlight environmental aspects and impacts that may be relevant to your business. Business topics list all the areas where your business might have impacts on the environment and these need to be considered when developing and EMS.

Netregs: Business Sectors Guidance

Identifying environmental issues and evaluating compliance

The NetRegs self-assessment tool takes you through a series of questions to help you check compliance with the main pieces of environmental legislation. A tailored report is produced for your business that can be used to help you understand what actions are needed to ensure compliance. This provides a starting point for developing a legal register.

NetRegs: Self-Assessment Tool

You can browse the Library of Environmental Topics for issues that affect your business. This is set out under headings such as "Air Pollution", "Land" "Waste" and "Water". Or you can use the search function to find specific topics.

NetRegs Environmental topics

Identifying Legal obligations

NetRegs provides lists of key environmental legislation. This will help you to find the pieces of legislation needed for your legal register. You can look for details on current, new and future legislation. Also, many of the environmental topics mentioned above include a list of legislation that applies to that subject.

Environmental legislation on NetRegs

Once your EMS is up and running it is important to keep up to date with changes existing and new legal requirements. Our monthly e-bulletin means you receive regular updates by email and is a useful prompt to keep your legal register up to date.

NetRegs Monthly e-update

Training and Awareness

All employees should receive some information about a company-s EMS to highlight the organisations commitment to environmental management, its objectives and what the EMS means for them and their roles. However, some staff and contractors will need specific training in relation to procedures and responsibilities related to compliance issues. NetRegs contains a number of free training tools that could help with this:

  • NetRegs:e-learning tools: on a range of topics such as Pollution Prevention, Duty of Care and achieving Environmental Excellence.
  • Pollution Prevention Guidelines on a range of environmental topics including incident response planning which is a key element of any good EMS.
  • Good Practice Videos including case studies and covering a range of topics related to environmental improvement opportunities.
Return to the menu of the Environmental Management Systems (EMS) and environmental reports environmental topic