Chapter 11
Making Your Business Processes
Environmentally Friendly
In This Chapter
Keeping up with innovative green building practices
Assessing your environmental risks
Discovering the special environmental challenges of manufacturers
A
ll businesses have processes, the day to day work that gets the job done.
These processes can be proactive about protecting the environment, or
they can keep up the status quo. Energy use, site selection, green building,
and recycling are some of the issues that affect all companies. Some companies
have more to consider in the area of making their processes environmentally
friendly; in particular, those in the manufacturing industry. In addition to the
green measures all companies take, manufacturers can hold all their processes
up to a green light and see how benefiting the environment in the areas of
emissions control, energy management, and waste management also makes
good business sense.The costs of abusing energy, working inappropriately with hazardous materi-
als, and subjecting people to unsafe and unhealthy working environments
have materialized in more ways than one. Beyond the financial outlays, a vital
regulatory culture has emerged, creating an atmosphere in which it is now
virtually impossible to conduct business as usual, carte blanche. Businesses
of every type and size must now proactively seek and develop new ways to
comprehensively examine, analyze, and govern their processes such that
they are both profitable and compliant with existing laws and regulations.This chapter suggests a variety of ways and means to achieve these ends
including changing your company’s culture by establishing new energy man-
agement programs and discovering ways to build your facilities in solid green.
Integrating a GRC program that encompasses all of your business phases,
including your emissions control and waste management, is a point of critical
concern that we shed a bit more light on, too.