Environmental Information Management Services Puts Environmental Liability Information at Your Fingertips
15 November 2004 — Environmental compliance ranks high on the list of corporate responsibilities, and most large companies have a department or division to manage such work. Companies generally find the task of assessing and quantifying their environmental liabilities extremely challenging—even those with significant technical and financial resources at their disposal.
Arecent BTI Consulting report titled E-strategies for Environmental Management estimates that for every dollar companies spend for environmental management, they spend another $1.75 for managing related information. Sooner or later, businesses must attack and eliminate this inefficiency in managing their environmental operations, particularly now that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires them to report these costs on their balance sheet. The resulting increased scrutiny of these obligations, and the possibility of lawsuits arising from incorrect or misleading information, also makes it imperative that officers and directors provide investors and regulators with as accurate an accounting as possible of their corporations’ environmental liabilities.
The investigation, cleanup, and long-term monitoring of contaminated waste sites, as well as air emissions monitoring and regulatory compliance monitoring, produce enormous amounts of data on the nature and extent of chemical presence at a site. One key to an effective environmental program is the deployment of an Environmental Information Management System (EIMS) that can provide managers and engineers with ready access to the information they need for their planning, decision-making, and reporting.
To read the full report go to www.environmental-resource.com.
