Best Practices for an Internal Compliance Strategy

In response to a range of factors that include shifting regulatory landscapes, increased societal awareness of health risks, and advancements in technology, environmental compliance has grown significantly over the past decade. For manufacturers and other businesses, a strong environmental compliance program is crucial to keeping up to date with this growth. As anyone working in the environmental compliance space will tell you, however, this can often be a daunting task. Here are some best practices for creating and maintaining an effective environmental compliance strategy.

1. Company and Management Involvement

While companies often have public statements about the importance of sustainability and compliance, management should also be actively involved in the environmental compliance programs in order to demonstrate the obligation via resource allocation, training, and policy setting. By creating a clear, manageable policy that outlines the organization’s environmental goals and commitment to compliance, company leaders can ensure that all employees—particularly those indirectly involved in such efforts—receive regular training on environmental compliance so that there’s effective alignment across departments. 

These practices allow a company to consider compliance at all stages of its operational processes. Companies that have environmental compliance siloed at the end of a given process, on the other hand, often increase the difficulty of achieving their regulatory goals. In addition, this approach increases the risk of noncompliance due to miscommunication or large gaps in coverage.

2. Regulatory Awareness

The greatest threat to compliance is the ever-evolving regulatory landscape itself. Because regulations and directives often build default compliance into the rules, ignorance can be a costly mistake. Keeping up-to-date with local, national, and international environmental regulations is key. The best strategies utilize tools or experts that regularly track changes in regulatory requirements and make the necessary adjustments within the organizations quickly and decisively. 

3. Risk Assessments

While businesses will ideally reach 100% coverage in their compliance efforts, that degree of adherence isn’t always possible. As a result, it can be critical to address these gaps in compliance. Conducting regular risk assessments to identify the organization's environmental compliance risks can help illuminate areas where alternate approaches need to be established, as well as clarify what actions companies can take to mitigate existing gaps. While these risk assessments are often complicated, they can also save a company time, money, and resources, and protect them from costly violations.

4. Supplier Relationships

Compliance strategies need to account for the reality that environmental compliance can rarely be effectively executed by acting exclusively internally. Implementing processes to ensure that suppliers and contractors comply with the organization’s environmental standards and regulatory requirements will significantly increase success rates and broaden compliance coverage. Clearly communicating expectations and providing resources and support for your suppliers can make your company’s compliance goals easier to achieve, in the process reducing your vulnerability to any potential non-compliance violations. Performing regular audits or requiring certifications from suppliers that demonstrate their compliance with existing environmental regulations can help facilitate the adoption of your company policies and ensure that they’re effectively adapting to changes to those policies over time. 

5. Due Diligence

Whether it’s REACH, RoHS, or California Prop 65, all regulations have one crucial requirement that cannot be overlooked: due diligence. Maintaining records of all compliance-related activities are the foundation of all effective regulatory adherence. Your strategy should include a system for tracking compliance-related documents and checking that they’re up to date, readily accessible, valid, and able to be audited by relevant parties. These documents should cover your communications, risk assessments, training, evidence packages, and other policies related to your overarching compliance strategy.

6. Regular Monitoring

Some regulations mandate living compliance programs, such as RoHS. This means you should periodically review the effectiveness of your environmental compliance strategy and update it as necessary based on emerging regulations or organizational changes. Regular assessments of regulatory compliance and existing environmental policies through both internal and third-party audits provide evidence of strategies success—all while helping you proactively mitigate the chances that a costly noncompliance event will strike. 

7. Emergency Planning

While the goal of a compliance strategy should be to avoid noncompliance, the best processes still develop an emergency response plan in the event of a violation. Such contingency measures provide organizations with a clear plan for responding to environmental noncompliance events with minimal impact to the organization. This can include protocols like component multisourcing, retaining trusted legal counsel for risk assessment reviews, and establishing a clear chain of command for escalations.

8. Reporting and Communication

Providing transparent reporting on environmental compliance efforts to internal and external stakeholders—including regulatory bodies, investors, and the public at large—may not be mandatory in every case. Nevertheless, building out a clear process for reporting environmental compliance statuses can demonstrate that a company is actively adhering to their own policies and can adapt quickly to specific stakeholder requests or changes in regulations (including those that impose mandatory reporting obligations). This can help foster a culture of continuous improvement by actively seeking feedback, learning from past incidents, and adopting new technologies or practices.

By implementing these best practices, organizations can develop a comprehensive environmental compliance strategy that helps maintain regulatory adherence while also fostering good environmental stewardship. This forward-thinking approach positions your organization to seamlessly integrate environmental responsibility into the core of your operations.