ASTM International

Standard Guide for Environmental Compliance Performance Assessment
 N E2365

Annotation

Overview - This guide is an organized collection of information and series of options for industry, regulators, auditors, consultants and the public, intended to measure compliance with environmental performance standards against established benchmarks. It focuses on compliance with air, water, waste prevention, waste management, and toxic reduction standards for facilities in the United States. While the guide does not recommend a specific course of action, it establishes a tiered framework of essential components, beginning with those standards where a deviation presents the greatest potential public health, environmental, and business risks. In each identified pathway, at each tier or step of analysis, the guide outlines ways to identify compliance options and reduce pollution in iterative steps. The goal in using the guide is to lower environmental, public health and business risks from Tiers 1 and 2 to Tiers 3 and 4, by evaluating the performance standards described in this guide. While this guide provides a simplified framework of explicit steps for users, a qualified professional should conduct detailed, sitespecific risk analysis. This guide may act as a starting point for organizations with limited experience in systematic environmental assessment. As facilities develop their specific plan framework, they will find that risk is weighted by more than just a few parameters. For each facility risk is the complex interaction among location, size, history, surrounding community and ecological zones.

Differences Among Standards - This guide focuses on compliance with environmental performance standards in the United States. As such it includes a unique, risk-based method to analyze specific groups of legal requirements, as well as risk reduction techniques, sometimes called "pollution prevention."

Use of this guide provides a system to evaluate the relative priority of compliance and pollution prevention activities. Unlike environmental management systems, it provides a framework to triage critical issues, based on consideration of actual risk of harm to public health and the environment.