Importance Of Environmental Auditing

INTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL AUDITING
The word 'Environmental auditing' originally started being used in United States in 1970s when some independently working companies , enhanced or rather transformed environmental auditing programs to an internal management tool which enables to evaluate the status of the operating system of a certain company.
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC, 1991) describe environmental auditing as a “A management tool comprising a systematic, documented, periodic and objective evaluation of how well environmental organization, management and equipment are performing with the aim of contributing to safeguarding the environment by facilitating management control of environmental practices and assessing compliance

Environmental audit is a systematic process that must be carefully planned, structured and organized. This is a long term process. The base of any environmental audit is that its findings are helped by documents and verifiable information. There are few key objectives of an environmental auditing ; determining how well the environmental management information systems and equipments are performing, verifying compliance with the relevant national, local, or other laws and regulations and minimizing human exposure to risks regarding environment, health and safety. Environmental auditing is performed when a progress is already in place. It is mostly employed to examine the existing practices and to determine the environmental effects of present activities. All kinds of organizations now recognize the importance of environmental matters. They accept the fact that their environmental performance will be examined by a wide range of parties and personnel. Environmental audit is widely used to investigate, understand and identify. These are used for the improvisation of active human

The experiments carried out include studying and questioning the policies, work instructions, procedures, manuals and other materials that form a part of management systems. Further, the inspection of scenes, events and processes is also included. Moreover, the examples which help to carry out the tests are also collected. During the audits, questions which are being verbally answered, are required to be supported by examples in the form of references to work instructions, manuals and procedures since it is an enigmatic help for the process of monitoring results. The environmental audit comprises of a well-formed, systematic approach. The process of audit comprises the below stated steps.
Planning the audit, preparing the checklists, reviewing any necessary background documents, conducting and documenting the audit, identifying and summarizing all non-conformances and observations, requesting corrective actions, completing any administrative tasks, stating the date for next audit.
The environmental audits are categorized based on the types of standards and the focuses of the