Just thinking on plans for next year, with the increased focus on becoming 'carbon neutral' and numerous other growing environmental concerns I wonder if this is side of things will become more prominent. Although the word 'environment' or at least the initials HSE appear a lot in job titles and documents I'm seeing suprisingly little focus on the 'E'. I think a lot of people generally get muddled between the 'Health, Safety & Environment' acronym and the Health and Safety Executive. 

There seem very few topics on here on environmental matters and few CPD events and magazine articles. Is anyone else expecting this somewhat sidelined aspect of our jobs to become rapidly more prominent in the ner future?

Originally Posted by: biker1

Unless Greta Thunberg becomes a member, I don't see much changing.

I'm not so sure, net zero by 2050 is going to mean quite a lot of work I think and given we look to have acquired the 'Environmental' portfolio I'm guessing much will fall to the HSE and facilities proffessions to carry out.

As a facilities person myself I'm wondering how much of the commercial and industrial building stock can be made truly carbon neutral within 30 years. A major rebuilding/refurbishment programme could potentially have a large carbon footprint itself so might be counter productive in the short term & offsetting and capture can surely only ever be a small part of the solution?

I have just had to combine our Health & safety policy with our stand alone Enviromental policy to create a Enviromental Health And Safety Policy, just to be certified to carry out work for an orginisation, yes a bit much i would say.

our role now dose seem to be increasing more & more, Enviromental just another bit for us to get our heads round. :(

Interesting OP bearing in mind recently presented a series of H&S sessions that included a number of topics rthat might be labelled Environmental ('E') although inlcuded due to the direct or indirect impact upon the usual H&S matters - fumes & emissions, noise, spills etc.  Yes they could be 'E' as well as being H&S.  Perhaps the challenge into the future is how they overlap or butt against each other and what each can learn from the other.  Or perhaps more contentious - can they or should they work together?

I think that the issue might end up being which takes priority the E or the H&S. So would you rather have dimmer lighting that goes off automatically just as people are about carry out a dangerous procedure or safe lighting that uses up a bit of the earth resources but you are at least sure that people will get home in one piece? With the financial sweeteners being thrown at the environmental thing right now, I think it will be the former?

Next year’s theme will be what can IOSH and its members do to preserve flying unicorns.

Until we stop burning fossil fuels it will be next to impossible to be a truely carbon neutral world. We could never plant tress quick enough to offset the fossil fuels, we would run out of time and space.

This combined with animal agriculture increasing throughout the world, despite the vegan movement, points to a very depressing picture.

Industry itself is not the answer to turning back the climate emergency, it is too small. We need Governments to make hard, unpopular decisions.

Originally Posted by: A Kurdziel

I think that the issue might end up being which takes priority the E or the H&S. So would you rather have dimmer lighting that goes off automatically just as people are about carry out a dangerous procedure or safe lighting that uses up a bit of the earth resources but you are at least sure that people will get home in one piece? With the financial sweeteners being thrown at the environmental thing right now, I think it will be the former?

Next year’s theme will be what can IOSH and its members do to preserve flying unicorns.

But thats always the issue to a large extent with other factors isn't it? Like cost & productivity. There are usually ways to square the circle and satisfy all requirements?

We will get dragged in to ever more detailed information requests from customers and clients to allow them to push numbers through various (flawed and faulty) calculators in order to permit big corporate to salve its social responsibilities declaring how green / carbon neutral they are by paying money to off-set schemers rather than actually eliminating input loading.

A previous failure is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme supposed to throttle business emissions through green investment.

A current failure is the recent EU negotiations where Poland was allowed to maintain its reliance upon coal - if we can't get 28 adjacent countries pulling in the same direction absolutely no chance of a global effort when you look to the more outwardly nationalist global leaders.

Originally Posted by: Roundtuit

We will get dragged in to ever more detailed information requests from customers and clients to allow them to push numbers through various (flawed and faulty) calculators in order to permit big corporate to salve its social responsibilities declaring how green / carbon neutral they are by paying money to off-set schemers rather than actually eliminating input loading.

A previous failure is the EU Emissions Trading Scheme supposed to throttle business emissions through green investment.

A current failure is the recent EU negotiations where Poland was allowed to maintain its reliance upon coal - if we can't get 28 adjacent countries pulling in the same direction absolutely no chance of a global effort when you look to the more outwardly nationalist global leaders.

Yes - but..... certainly efforts up to now have been patchy in their effectiveness at best. However it seems clear something  more concrete has to happen. I think we're following a natural curve that applies in any situation where you have to move to a less comfortable position to avoid an incoming threat, people will naturally skirt and evade as long as possible - the question is really what point on the curve we have reached.

Originally Posted by: jwk

Good and salient points here, but as to whether environment is the job of the H&S bod, well, I'd rather it wasn't. As a vegan myself I agree that we have to tackle some very difficult issues to get emissions down to anything near a sustainable level, and that in itself won't begin to touch the extinction crisis we're also facing. So its a big job, and it deserves its own specialists in organisations. Yes, we must work with those specialists, but in bog companies at least they lead and we follow.

Before anybody asks, if I found myself on a desert island with a pig, I would build myself a pig-proof shelter: have you seen the teeth on those things?

John

This is the point I was trying to make. We need big iniatives that don't rely on small industries to manage. We need a governmental shift towards forcing change through. What does it matter if we are recycling, not polluting rivers etc. if we continue to burn fossil fuels and fund animal agriculture? It will all be lip service. The actions needed are not ones individuals can take.

As to whether it is a good time to jump onto the "E" bandwagon. Probably, we all know the government will just try to deligate their responsibilities, like all governments do. It means the unpopular choices will be easier to blame on someone else.

As for the pig on an island, I always ask "what is the pig eating?". It seems this island situation seems reliant on me travelling alone with a pig and no other supplies.

Personally I think a lot of progress could be made by doing less, or in some cases nothing. By that I don't necessarily mean sitting on your sofa in your pants drinking premium strength lager instead of going to work but just not doing stuff that doesn't bring value.

For instance our company has an adversion to 'working from home' presumably because they fear we will be indulging in the pants and lager scenario if they do. So as a result I heated, ventilated and lit 15,000 square feet of building on Christmas Eve so 3 people could drive in and sit at their desks in opposite corners of the building at their computers for half a day then drive home again, all had company laptops. What could we have saved in resources by them simply working from home that day? Yet I can easily get a £30k budget to optimise BMS controls to shave off some utilities costs here and there. Probably not amounting per quarter to what was spent on Christmas Eve - but one is an active measure where something is done, value is added, people walk about in overalls with spanners and work has been done. The other is just not doing something and someone would have a feeling they might have lost on the deal.

Originally Posted by: ttxela

 the question is really what point on the curve we have reached. 

We dropped off the curve when IT businesses started consuming resources to launch people to Mars and simultaneoulsy declare we need to envelope the world with more satellite systems to beam cat pictures from their servers. Whilst one nation unilaterally permits such excess without so much as a by your leave to the other inhabitants of the planet then in the words of Private Frasier "we're all doomed"

Originally Posted by: A Kurdziel

A lot of the so called environmental stuff is just a matter of perception, with people and organisations doing this just for the sake of  been seen to be taking part in certain rituals with no more understanding than Solomon islanders cargo cults. A lot of this is sympathetic magic, people telling me that we need to save water, as there is a drought in Australia with attending consequences.

From our point of view what worries me about all of this bandwagon is that there is no clear picture of what the endpoint is. At least with H&S we can say that our aim is to ensure that we have taken all reasonable precautions to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of our staff and we have some metrics which can indicate we are getting somewhere. In the distant past ( 5 years ago!) we talked about sustainably where we balanced out environmental issues with economic and social requirements but that’s seems to have been thrown out of the window and environmentalism  the only thing.  How long that is sustainable as policy I don’t know as we will at some point start have to make really hard decision (beyond carbon neutral) about what we actually want. For some of those demonstrating on the streets nothing short of returning to the Stone Age (Palaeolithic- pre farming) will be enough and for some nothing sort of returning the earth to its pristine pre-human state will be enough. We need to set proper goals along with establishing sustainable ways of delivering them: Soon otherwise we will end up pandering to the loony fringe.

But is this a core part of Health and Safety? I am not sure as I see a certain tension between the roles in the same way as having H&S directly under production or finance is probably not a good idea.

 

There's a bit to unpack there!

I'm not sure I see a massive difference in the clarity of endpoints, H&S itself has fairly vague aims, these days not many people claim to be working towards 0 accidents and mostly talk interms of improvements in trends etc.

I think there are plenty of environmental metrics too, both on a local and global scale, certainly one can easily measure resource consumptions and waste outputs for a start if one is of the improvement mindset and zero net emissions is a pretty firm target although like everything on a national scale will have fudgey edges.

Of course once one starts to look on a global scale some really interesting questions are raised, for instance what about the aspirational developing economies? Many contries aspire to a western standard of living and some are progressing markedly towards it. Assuming the ultimate conclusion of this is everyone globally reaching a comparable standard of living what would a sustainable global lifestyle look like? Probably not much like our current one, especially at current population levels....

With regard to what we want, personally I'd like to avoid mass suffering of the kind predicted in many quarters. I'm sure the planet will survive and reasonably sure some form of life will survive on it, maybe the sustainability ship has already sailed and we should be looking towards ensuring the human extinction is as painless as possible. The Rev. Malthus may yet be proved right......