Abstract

Every Environmental Management System [EMS] requires implementing organizations to identify the environmental aspects of their activities, products or services and clearly show how the identification of aspects that may have significant impacts on the environment are identified. However, procedures for the identification of aspects that are significant are not clearly defined. This paper adapt and modify the process used to identify project risks as a framework to develop a generic framework that can be used by all manufacturing and service organizations to identify the environmental aspects of their activities as well as those that are significant. The proposed framework outlines four key steps in identifying impacts that are significant, viz. Environmental Aspects Identification; Environmental Risk Assessment; Environmental Risk Profiling; and Environmental Risk Threshold Values.The paper assesses the usability of the proposed framework by choosing one of the key activities in the mining sector as a test case. In this text case, the model identified dust as the most significant environmental impact in a typical hauling operation in a mine.

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