Intent
Our consultants first worked with Capcoal assisting in the development and implementation of a formal Environmental Management System (EMS) in 2002. The EMS was coordinated by one environment team based at Capcoal opencut, and was applied across five (5) separate underground and opencut mine sites.
Intent was to:
- Update to reflect compliance to a new Environmental Authority (licence)
- Ensure the EMS met the (then) recently released Anglo Coal Safety, Health, Environment and Community (SHEC) Policies, Standards and Procedures
- Apply common EMS elements across underground and opencut operations, while providing for mine-specific requirements where needed
- Achieve and maintain certification to ISO 14001
Approach
Initial scoping exercise resulted in comprehensive task list for development and roll-out of the system over an 18 month timeframe.
For development of the system, a mentoring approach was adopted, with three (3) day ‘mentoring sessions’ held on a monthly basis on site. During mentoring sessions, time was spent with the EMS Coordinator developing their knowledge by collaborating on procedures, registers, training materials, regulatory compliance requirements etc.
During development, a number of support services were provided including:
- Facilitate risk assessment sessions and develop risk registers
- Develop document control and record keeping processes for the EMS
- Conduct site-wide training needs analysis
- Develop Legal and Other Requirements Register
- Implement internal compliance assessment program
- Conduct external compliance audits
- Conduct AS1940 hydrocarbon bunding audits
- Conduct 5 yearly audit of waste management contractor against contract scope
At the request of the client, we attended both the ISO 14001 pre-certification and certification audits in 2003 to assist the EMS Coordinator get through the audit, as well as ongoing surveillance and re-certification audits from 2005-2012.
Deployment
The resulting EMS was rolled out across all mine sites through:
- Development of an Environmental Handbook for hand out at induction
- Re-induction of all staff to revised induction
- Targeted face-to-face training program for Supervisors and Managers
- Development and roll-out of a set of themed environmental information posters
- Suite of 12 environmental toolbox talks for monthly delivery by area supervisors across all mine sites
- Develop checklist and training for environmental housekeeping inspections for use by supervisors
- Development of a set of poster-based pictorial operating procedures for key environmental risks (e.g. water management, hydrocarbons, dust, flora and fauna etc) – these are displayed on noticeboards on a rotating basis.
Outcomes
- Measurable performance improvements in key areas including waste management, surface water management, dust control and interaction with wildlife.
- EMS implemented across all sites
- Certification to ISO 14001 in 2003 (still current)
- Flexibility built into system allowed for additional mine sites to be added to the scope (now covers 10 mine sites in various stages ranging from recently acquired/expanded to care and maintenance)
- We continue to run intensive 4-5 day mentoring programs for all new EMS Coordinators to ‘onboard’ them to the EMS
- Exis consultants have attended a number of ISO 14001 surveillance and re-certification assistants to act as another auditee to assist the EMS Coordinator and provide additional resources
- Ongoing relationship to present day involving regular EMS maintenance visits (health checks), audits, training and major documentation review/update