Environmental Aspect and Impacts Assessments together with Site Inspections are the building blocks and first steps for an organisation to identify where and how it impacts and interacts with the environments, whether it be locally, further afield or globally. An organisation cannot formulate a policy and strategy without knowing how it impacts the environment.

An Environmental Aspect and Impact assessment or EIA is an assessment of your organisation and its activities how what and where you organisation interacts and impacts the environment. It really drills down to the the levels of interaction that you may not have even considered and taking as scientific and holistic look at your organisation within the environment in which it operates.

This isn't something performed from a desktop, this is a practical assessment whereby we make visual observations, take measurements and even use scientific instruments.

Assessment is split in to 5 parts and at the end of the assessment each activity that impacts the environment will be given a numerical risk rating and where necessary a recommendation of the appropriate corrective action. 

The parts of an Environmental Aspect and Impact Assessment (EIA) are as follows:

Identification of Aspects:

These are the activities that interact and impact the environment. For example a your process emissions, external noise or CO2 emitted from your vehicle activities.

Identification of Impacts:

This section looks at the impacts caused by the aspects, using the above examples, process emissions could result in pollution of local water sources, external noise could not only be a nuisance but could also interfere in the way wildlife communicates or may even make them leave the area, and CO2 emission adds to the global warming and climate change issues.

Existing Controls:

Does exactly that, it identifies the controls you currently have and lists them. For example you may  have spill kits for any leak, you may have sound proofing for your noise, and you may have a car sharing scheme or electric vehicles to reduce your C02 footprint.

Level of risk (risk rating):

Uses are numerical risk scoring matrix to assign a numerical value for the risk after your existing controls have been applied. It works on likelihood of an environmental versus the level of consequence.

Further action required:

If the level of risk calculated by the method above still presents a risk to your organisation and the environment, then we'll recommend the controls you can put in place to lower the risk.