ALEXANDRIA, VA — Under a cooperative agreement with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Water Environment Federation (WEF) plans a new project to develop a comprehensive Environmental Management System (EMS) for water and wastewater utilities.
The project will look at successful utility management tools, identify barriers to the implementation of available programs, and identify incentives for integrating these tools into a comprehensive EMS.
Recommendations from the effort, titled "Development of Comprehensive Environmental Management Systems Guidance For Public Utilities — Phase I," will be used in a second phase, possibly to develop a guidance document for utilities.
Current utility management programs and techniques are disconnected from one another, and widespread adoption has been slow. This project will examine the feasibility of developing a comprehensive EMS to enable utilities to identify and efficiently manage their capital assets, address a range of environmental impacts, and focus on improving environmental performance beyond levels required by regulations — all through an open process that addresses the needs of communities, regulators and other stakeholders, the WEF said.
"I am very excited about this comprehensive EMS project," said Stephen Graef, chair of WEF's Utility Management Committee. "It will provide a practical EMS template for all utility business categories — a utility-wide approach that takes the best management programs out there and integrates them into an overall EMS framework."
The Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA) will partner with the WEF and the EPA on this project. A work group, comprised of WEF and AMSA members, and other key stakeholders, including officials from the EPA, will have its initial meeting at WEFTEC 2001, the federation's annual meeting and exhibition to be held in Atlanta, GA, in October. A project Web page, hosted on the WEF Web site and linked to the AMSA site, is planned to provide information and promote dialogue.
The WEF is a not-for-profit technical and educational organization with members from varied disciplines. The WEF network includes more than 100,000 water quality professionals from 31 countries.
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