April 15th, 2024 by Dakota Software Staff
Considering the civil—and even criminal—penalties that can result from environmental permit violations, non-compliance is something few organizations can afford to ignore.
It’s a precarious situation for industrial companies, some of which may have hundreds of individual permit requirements for just a single site. Multiply that across a large number of sites, all with varying operational processes, and the compliance risk grows exponentially.
The secret to airtight compliance lies in having a systematic, closed-loop process for cataloging actionable permit to-do’s, tracking their on-time completion, and conducting audits against permit requirements.
In this article, we explore the basics of environmental permit management, including:
What an environmental permit is, industries that require them, and risks of non-compliance
A four-step process any company can use to improve permit management
How EHS software helps ensure continuous compliance with environmental permit obligations
An environmental permit is a legal document issued by a regulatory agency that authorizes an organization to undertake certain activities that have the potential to impact the environment. A permit lists all the terms and conditions a specific site must meet in order for it to be allowed to conduct those activities.
Permits may be issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with permitting authority often delegated to state environmental agencies. In some cases, permits may also be issued at the municipal level.
Environmental permits are required for a wide variety of industries and specific environmental impacts, including:
Resource extraction such as oil and gas drilling, mining operations, and water intake from public waterways
Certain environmental releases such as air emissions regulated under EPA Clean Air Act and releases to waterways regulated under the Clean Water Act and National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits
Waste disposal under regulations such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)
Impacts to endangered or threatened species and their habitat that fall under Endangered Species Act (ESA) regulations
Lack of visibility into permit compliance status means sites may not know they’re out of compliance until it’s too late—when deviations of the permit terms and conditions have already occurred. Unfortunately, this can come at a steep price, resulting in regulatory penalties and negative publicity.
Violate an NPDES or RCRA permit, for example, and your company may face up to $50,000 per day in fines. And that’s just the beginning. Should there be an environmental incident, your organization could be on the hook for far more.
In 2022, the EPA filed 117 criminal cases, with a conviction rate of 94%. The agency levied fines up to $96 million dollars over Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and RCRA violations, in some cases sentencing business owners to jail time.
On top of all this, the EPA publishes press releases online of enforcement cases, as well as a searchable Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database of environmental violations.
Effective permit management requires a closed-loop process that ensures all compliance tasks are completed in the required timeframe, thus reducing violations and potential environmental incidents. Below we break this process down into four steps to help eliminate compliance gaps.
The first step in the process is to read through each permit and identify all of the actionable requirements listed therein. Critical words to look for include words like “shall” and “must,” as well as any tables describing permitted limits, monitoring frequencies, and reporting timelines.
Another crucial task to identify here is your permit renewal date and any associated requirements, so that you don’t unwittingly discover a key permit has expired.
Once you’ve identified all the applicable and actionable requirements in your permit, your next step is to use them to build compliance calendars for each site.
For example, let’s say your site has permit requirements associated with water quality. Those individual tasks for collecting samples, sending them for testing, and reporting results should be scheduled within the timeframes specified in the permit and contain any relevant documentation for completing said tasks.
All permit compliance tasks should be assigned to specific individuals to ensure items don’t fall through the cracks. Essential priorities here are:
Keeping assignees aware of approaching due dates
Escalating overdue or incomplete tasks to management to ensure accountability
Documenting completion of tasks
Uploading any evidence of compliance, such as test results, discharge reports, or waste generation records
The final step in the process is to perform verification and gap analysis, auditing your operations against permit requirements to make sure your site is in compliance.
Environmental audits should compare individual permit requirements and due dates against existing controls. Where controls or evidence of compliance doesn’t exist for individual requirements, corrective actions should be assigned to address these compliance gaps, feeding back into step three above. Gaps could also include missing requirements which can be added as detailed in Step 1, thus ensuring continuous compliance.
Each permit may contain numerous site-specific requirements, which can change from year to year depending on the operating parameters and regulatory status of the site. When teams manage permits using low-tech or homegrown systems such as spreadsheets on network drives and email, the process can be time-consuming and error-prone, increasing compliance risks.
A comprehensive Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) software platform can help reduce these risks while simplifying each step of the permit management process. Dakota Software’s ProActivity suite, for instance, provides everything EHS professionals need to:
Build site-specific compliance plans based on actionable permit requirements, in addition to all applicable federal and state regulations
Plan recurring compliance action items and permit renewal dates on compliance calendars
Monitor completion of compliance tasks against due dates specified in compliance calendars, with automatic notifications and escalations for approaching and overdue tasks
Schedule, manage, and track findings of audits conducted against permit requirements
Using EHS software in this way provides full visibility into compliance status at both the organizational and site level. All permit requirements are cataloged electronically, as either a task or an audit question, with tools to keep the process on track according to mandated timelines.
With millions of dollars and a company’s public reputation at stake, effective permit management is a strategic imperative for all industrial organizations. EHS software provides an accountability loop from permit requirements to task completion to verification, so that organizations can maintain ongoing compliance without having to worry about unintentional permit violations.
View the Demo Library to learn how Dakota Software tools can help you maintain a continuous state of compliance in your organization.
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