Summary of the Development of Our EMS

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Philadelphia EMS Home Summary Scope Policy Facility Team Aspects of Our Operations	Impacts of Our Operations Significant Aspects Goals Manual Procedures Programs Workplans	Operational Controls Management Review Definitions Legal and Other Requirements Schedule	Training Accomplishments Green Lease What Our Employees Can Do Make a Suggestion

The first step we took when we set out to establish our Environmental Management System or EMS was to define our policy.

All the goals of our EMS are outlined in this written Region 3 EMS Policy, which has been signed by all the senior managers.

In order to manage our facility in a manner that protects the environment, the safety of our employees, and public health, EPA has committed to producing and implementing an EMS for our Office/Facility in the building located at 1650 Arch Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In order to help with developing, implementing and integrating our EMS into our operations, we have named an EMS Coordinator/Management Representative and created a EMS Team with representatives of the various programs or organizational groups in the EPA Mid-Atlantic Region 3 office.

Our EMS Team with input from our employees has developed a list of our Activities/Products/Services and their associated Environmental Aspects and Impacts. We have also developed a corresponding list of our Aspects that result from our activities/products and services and the environmental Impacts of these Aspects.

Based on a comprehensive list of all of our aspects, the Region 3 EMS Team has rated and ranked the top Significant Aspects of the EPA Mid-Atlantic Region 3 Philadelphia Office.

In order to prioritize and address our most important/significant aspects, we created work plans to help us meet our Targets and Objectives for our significant aspects to reduce their environmental impact. Management endorsed the targets and objectives as well as three work plans for achieving them.

Our EMS Team has developed an EMS Manual that gathers together and organizes all the documentation needed to support our EMS. The EMS Manual contains our Policy, background information and a description of our EMS as well as our Procedures for things including how we determined what our significant aspects were, how we established our targets and objectives, how we will train our employees, audit our EMS and provide for management review and action that is the vital link to continuous improvement and the cycle of plan, do, check and act.

The EMS Manual contains Environmental Management Programs or EMPs for Gasoline Use and Air Emissions (PDF) (2 pp, 27K, About PDF), Electricity Use (PDF) (2 pp, 29K, About PDF), Paper Use (PDF) (2 pp, 26K, About PDF), Waste Reduction (PDF) (2 pp, 29K, About PDF) and Green Product Purchasing (PDF) (2 pp, 27K, About PDF), that describe how we will strive to achieve our targets and objectives.

The EMS Manual also contains operational controls for how we will control and manage our significant aspects. We have laid out roles and responsibilities, what we will do and how we will do it for the following activities:

Paper Use in Copy Center (PDF) (4 pp, 49K, About PDF),
Electricity Use in Work Stations and Common Areas (PDF) (10 pp, 126K, About PDF),
Petroleum Use and Waste Generation in Transport of our Employees (PDF) (6 pp, 81K, About PDF) ,
Paper and Electricity Use in Printing and Copying (PDF) (2 pp, 20K, About PDF),
Reduce, Reuse and Recycling Program (PDF) (4 pp, 20K, About PDF) ,
Electricity Use in Air Conditioning and Ventilation of office Space (PDF) (2 pp, 16K, About PDF)
"Green" Meetings (PDF) (2 pp, 19K, About PDF), and
"Green" Purchasing (PDF) (4 pp, 26K, About PDF).

Finally, the EMS Manual contains our Audit Program, our Suggestion and Non-Conformance Report Programs and the Definitions we used in our EMS.

The EMS Team developed a table containing a comprehensive list of Legal and Other Requirements (PDF) (10 pp, 55K, About PDF) for the EPA Mid-Atlantic Regional office in Philadelphia.

Our EMS works on an annual Schedule of planning, doing, checking and acting.

In February 2004, the EPA Mid-Atlantic office was certified in conformance with Executive Order 13148 . (This Executive Order was subsequently revoked by Executive Order 13423 .)