A 4-Step Environmental Permitting Process: Permit Management
Considering the civil, and even criminal. penalties that can result from environmental permit violations, non-compliance is something few organizations can afford to ignore in regards to environmental protection obligations. Regulatory agencies play a critical role in enforcing environmental requirements, ensuring that businesses meet legal standards to protect the environment and public well-being.
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. Environmental concerns and environmental permitting are central to the permitting process for projects and proposed projects, especially in the context of development activities that may impact natural resources and require careful regulatory oversight.
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. Organizations with extensive experience in the permitting process can help clients navigate complex environmental regulations and ensure compliance with all relevant standards.
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
- The importance of environmental permitting in balancing economic development with the need to protect public health, protect human health, and public health by adhering to environmental requirements and safeguarding human health
- A four-step process any company can use to improve permit management
- How EHS software helps ensure continuous compliance with environmental permit obligations
What is an Environmental Permit?
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. At the federal level, agencies such as the army corps, national marine fisheries service, and their regional offices play a key role in reviewing permit applications and overseeing permit types for various projects.
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
- Construction activities, which require permits to manage air quality, hazardous materials, hazardous waste, and hazardous wastes
There are different permit types, including general permits and individual permits, each dictating its own necessary environmental permitting process. General permits are typically used for smaller-scale activities with less regulatory complexity, while individual permits are required for larger or more complex projects that do not qualify for general or conceptual approval permits.
The environmental permitting process involves submitting detailed documentation to meet permitting requirements, including environmental impact assessments and compliance with statutes such as the National Environmental Policy Act. This environmental permitting process may also require the development of a habitat conservation plan to ensure the protection of wildlife habitats.
What Non-Compliance Could Cost Your Organization
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 environmental permits 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.
Put AI to Work on Your Environmental Permits
See how Dakota’s AI Permit Analyzer highlights key requirements so your team can focus on action instead of manual review.
Simplifying Environmental Permit Management: A 4-Step Process
Effective permit management requires a closed-loop permitting process that ensures all compliance tasks are completed in the required timeframe, thus reducing violations and potential environmental incidents. Conducting an environmental review is a critical part of this permitting process, as it helps assess regulatory compliance and identify potential gaps related to ecological impacts. Below we break this process down into four steps to help eliminate compliance gaps.
Step 1: Identify Actionable Environmental Permit Requirements
The first step in the environmental permitting 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 environmental permitting 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 necessary environmental permit has expired.
Step 2: Build Your Compliance Calendar
Once you’ve identified all the applicable and actionable requirements in your environmental permit, your next step is to use them to build your EHS compliance calendars for each site.
For example, let’s say your site has permit requirements associated with water quality. Those individual tasks for collecting water quality 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.
Step 3: Execute Compliance 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
Step 4: Verification and Gap Analysis
The final step in the environmental permitting process is to perform verification and gap analysis, auditing your operations against permit requirements to make sure your site is in compliance with environmental regulations.
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 permit requirements which can be added as detailed in Step 1, thus ensuring continuous compliance. For more guidance on environmental audits, consider reviewing four key questions that support successful and sustainable audit processes.
Leveraging EHS Software for Permit Management
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 and its applicable environmental regulations. When teams manage environmental 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 to keep track of necessary environmental permits 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. This is a massive optimization to any site’s permitting process, as well as best-practice according to the relevant permitting authority.
With millions of dollars and a company’s public reputation at stake, effective permit management is a strategic imperative for all industrial organizations with environmental protection obligations. 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 EHS compliance in your organization.
