ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATION - 02.06.2008

What legislation applies to your business?

A daunting prospect

You’ve decided that you want to avoid any nasty surprises if an inspector from either the Environment Agency (EA) or local authority environmental health department (LA) turns up. So you’ve decided to try and identify all of the potential environmental legal issues facing your business. However, you didn’t get far before you realised that it might not be that simple. As far as you were concerned there were only a few pieces of environmental legislation that you needed to worry about but with a quick search of the Internet you realised that this isn’t the case. How much legislation is out there that might affect what you do?

Rafts of legislation

Although there are many pieces of legislation that cover environmental management, the good news is that not all of them will apply to your business, or at least not directly anyway.

Note. In addition to the general laws that cover all businesses there are some that apply to a particular business sector only. For example, there are specific laws that apply to farms, fisheries etc.

Tip. In many cases, the business sector the legislation applies to will be in the title of the document. If you see that the legislation has a business sector other than yours in the title, then you don’t need to worry about it.

Key areas

There are five key areas of environmental legislation that affect most businesses. These include:

• waste

• packaging

• water pollution

• air pollution

• local “nuisances” - things like litter, noise and amenity issues such as obstructions, serious eyesores etc.

Do you have to do anything?

Just because a law might apply to your business, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do much, if anything. A prime example of this is waste legislation. For most businesses the only legislative requirement will be to complete a waste transfer note and ensure that waste is put in the appropriate containers. Most of your legal duties will be looked after by the waste contractor. Therefore, most businesses, especially ones that don’t have any processes that could cause pollution, only need to have a basic knowledge and understanding of the law.

Tip 1. Even though, in many cases, others will do most of the work for you, it’s worth knowing what legislation covers the task. To help, we’ve created a basic list of environmental regulations and how they may affect your business (see Thenextstep). We suggest that you download it and add it to any environmental information you hold.

Tip 2. If an inspector, insurance assessor etc. asks how you are keeping up-to-date with the law, you can show them the list. You can also state that you subscribe to this publication.

The next step

For a list of some of the environmental regulations that are likely to apply to your business, visit http://environment.indicator.co.uk(EN 03.01.07).