Standardized hazardous materials management for global environmental compliance in industrial enterprises

Enhanced global trade forces companies to comply with a variety of environmental legislations each being subject to continuous modifications. Apart from various maximum permissible values of certain substances and different requirements, e.g. for registration or authorization, latest developments in the field conflict minerals constrain enterprises to adjust internal processes. This puts high pressure especially on global players with multiple thousand active suppliers and hundreds of global sales regions. For OEMs global environmental compliance requires involvement of the entire supply chain and multiple internal business units. Additionally, law enforcement agencies expand activities while competitors may easily take misconduct to court and thus may temporarily refuse market access. This may induce dramatic costs for companies. In order to reduce risk and prevent undesired obsolescence of their products, companies seek a standardized process to guarantee global environmental compliance. Recently, scientific improvements in this area have been rare. In this paper we introduce a highly applicable approach that has been tested successfully in over 70 companies in Germany. We divide efforts in five categories (1. targets; 2. actual company status; 3. risk assessment 4. required actions; 5. long term validation) and 14 steps towards global environmental compliance. Thereby, we identify affected divisions and define distinct methods to effectively map legal requirements, evaluate suppliers and rate a company's material stock. Hereupon, we combine supplier and material rating in order to evaluate a company's general risk and name a number of distinct actions for supplier communication. We come up with solutions to adjust internal processes such as data processing and IT as well as recommendations for detailed work procedures and audit plans to effectively ensure long term global environmental compliance. Although integral risk validation might not be possible, our paper shows a high demand in industries for future research in the field standardizing environmental compliance processes by applying unique algorithms. Additionally, current environmental risk assessment methods leave room for interpretation. We identify possible approaches for improvements as well as solutions for current methods.