The I.C.E. (Identify, Control and Eliminate) Protocol is an easy to follow approach for reducing your environmental exposures. With so much going on at your facility at any one time, these simple steps go a long way toward eliminating existing and potential liabilities.

This keeps your employees safe, helps stop costly cleanups from spills and other incidents, and ensures you’re in the good graces of regulators.

The first step is to…

Identify your environmental, health and safety issues.

To do this you must develop a strong knowledge base about your facility. You must understand everything your facility does and how you do it. Your team (long-service employees and managers, especially) is a great resource here, as are existing permits, your current documentation of processes, and your colleagues at a sister facility.

You should also consider getting a second pair of eyes on your facility, such as an environmental consultant. As an “outsider” they can often spot things you miss because of familiarity blindness. In a nutshell, you’re so used to seeing your facility as is, you can’t identify what are seemingly obvious liabilities – which is probably why they haven’t been dealt with before.

Step 4: Keep Moving Forward and Maintain Progress

Step 3: The Dreaded Regulations and How to Deal with Them

If you missed Step 1 or Step 2 of this series, use these links to read the articles. One of the biggest challenges for any facility or plant manager is to stay in compliance – and in the good graces of regulators. As your facility changes, the permits you have might need to be modified. Or, you might even need totally new permits. Not to mention, regulations are always changing.

But perhaps an even bigger challenge is to get in compliance in the first place.

When you’re starting from scratch, it’s a goal that can seem unachievable. But, because of the very real risk of financial penalties or even facility shutdown, it’s something you have to do… and you should get started now.

The best way to face this big task is to break it into smaller pieces that you tackle one by one:

Step 1: Understand Your Facility Operations

Step 2: Get It Together and Become a Well Organized and Efficient Manager

Step 3: The Dreaded Regulations and How to Deal with Them

Step 4: Keep Moving Forward and Maintain Progress

(Be sure to read Step 1: Understand Your Facility Operations and Step 2: Get It Together and Become a Well Organized and Efficient Manager if you haven’t already.)

What Regulations Do You Need to Worry About?

There are hundreds of regulations – and thousands of pages – covering environmental, health and safety at the local, state, and federal level.

How do you know what rules apply to your facility and the work you do? It can be overwhelming, but there is help available.

With so many regulations and required permits, many facility managers struggle to stay in compliance – and in the good graces of regulators. It’s a task made more difficult by the fact that regulations and related requirements are always changing.

It can seem like a monumental task. But if you break it down into steps, you can efficiently get into compliance – and relatively quickly, too. Those four steps are:

Step 1: Understand Your Facility Operations

Step 2: Get It Together and Become a Well Organized and Efficient Manager

Step 3: The Dreaded Regulations and How to Deal With Them

Step 4: Keep Moving Forward and Maintain Progress

If you haven’t done so already, please read Step 1: Understand Your Facility Operations, first.

Step 1: Understand Your Facility Operations

I give a talk regularly at industry conferences and educational seminars about how facilities can beef up their environmental, health and safety (EH&S) policies and protocols.

As I’ve written about previously, when it comes to EH&S, simply complying with permits and regulations isn’t enough. That course of action, while necessary, is limited and doesn’t do enough to keep your facility safe from risks and threats. Think of basic compliance as looking at a rear-view mirror, while ignoring the windshield and what lies ahead.

My audiences generally get that. But a related question pops up quite often.

“We just need to get into compliance in the first place – how do you do that?”

I understand where they’re coming from.

It’s a nightmare scenario for any facility manager.

You’ve prepped for months for a major capital improvement that will expand your operations – and hopefully boost profits.

Executives and bigwigs from around the country are flying in for the ground-breaking ceremony.

Then, the day before or the day of… or maybe a few days later, all work must stop.

There are a variety of reasons, which will go into in just a moment, but the root cause is that you didn’t get your environmental consultant involved early enough in the process.

A lot of people—maybe you’re one of them—put off going to the doctor for a checkup, an annual physical, or one of those screenings or tests that are so important as you get older.

It’s understandable. There’s a fear of finding out there’s something wrong, a comfort in not knowing. But avoiding the test can allow a medical issue to get even worse.

It’s the same at your facility. Even if you think everything is running smoothly, there may be issues in your processes, facility layout or features, equipment, or practices. These unrecognized issues can quickly turn into expensive liabilities.