Ensure Environmental Permit Compliance with Simple Tasks that Matter

Environmental permit compliance is integral to long-term value.

A major part of a company’s environment, health, safety, and sustainability (EHS&S) performance lies in environmental permit compliance, an integral part of its long-term health, risk management, and value creation. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to maintain consistent regulatory compliance or demonstrate clear progress toward performance goals. A quick search in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database shows there are currently over 2,000 facilities with violations in the state of California alone.

It’s clear that managing permits and regulatory requirements can be overwhelming, especially when a single industrial site may require multiple permits, each containing hundreds of pages. In this blog, we break down the challenges of environmental permit compliance and offer a simple solution that could not only improve efficiency, but also avoid costly fines and create value.  

Relegating compliance to the specialists’ sphere of control limits what is possible.

Regulators and stakeholders such as investors, media, and consumers demand that companies they do business with are transparent with their environmental and social conduct. As such, companies can’t afford to relegate EHS&S activities to highly specialized and heavily isolated departments. 

Ongoing EHS&S success requires expanding ownership of environmental permit compliance from the specialists’ sphere of control to the front line. Yes, EHS&S experts track compliance, but they do not control it. Placing the burden of responsibility for permit compliance solely on this small group not only results in process bottlenecks, inconsistent performance, and high costs, it also undermines an organization’s capacity to manage risk or set and achieve ambitious performance goals. 

Industry leaders mobilize their entire organization to manage risk.

Achieving effective risk management and regulatory compliance requires teamwork across the organization as well as daily effort from those on a facility’s frontlines. In the new EHS&S landscape, industry leaders will be those who unite their organizations under a shared vision of success and mobilize their teams with a clear, manageable plan to achieve it. With robust, reliable compliance plans in place, these organizations will free up valuable time and resources. 

Ultimate success, however, depends on whether a company can break free from EHS&S bottlenecks and enable staff to drive consistent performance. And doing so will take more than simply purchasing the latest EHS&S management software. 

Break out of the EHS bottleneck and empower your staff with simple tasks that matter.

At Montrose, we help companies empower staff with the simple tasks that matter most for achieving permit compliance. We work closely with clients to provide targeted solutions that enhance operational efficiency while ensuring compliance. Our approach includes: 

• Analyze documents to identify requirements
• Turn requirements into consolidated, easy to understand tasks
• Load tasks into an EHS&S management system, available to all staff
• Provide ongoing support

While regulatory content providers and AI solutions stop at identifying relevant content and isolated requirements, Montrose leverages our best-in-class task template library to organize, consolidate, and translate complex regulatory requirements into clear, meaningful compliance tasks for frontline workers in one streamlined process. Tasks are written in plain language, fit for use by anyone at the facility, and ready to load into any EHS system. 

The EHS&S landscape has evolved. To succeed, you need only to empower your organization – from frontline workers to top-level executives – with the systems, transparency, and simple tasks that matter most to EHS&S performance.