Our resident Environmental specialist and trainer John Binns, is on hand to answer questions about our new online NEBOSH Environmental Certificate course. Question & Answers with John Binns How do you find the experience of presenting content for online courses & have you done this before? I think this is the third time I have presented the content for an RRC environmental management course. So, I am becoming a bit of an old hand! When I started my career in environmental management I certainly didn’t expect to ever be filmed at any time doing my job. The first time I completed the filming I was a little nervous, but I…
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Five New Year’s Resolutions for Environmental Practitioners
It that time of the year unfortunately, the festive season is over, winter is in full swing, at least if you are in the northern hemisphere and finances are generally low (at least until February!). However now is the time to set some environmental new year’s resolutions. In this post I’ve come up with a few ideas for environmental professionals. Some will be relevant to you, some not but at least it is a starting point, why not write your own list, but hopefully this will give you some ideas. Pick one impact that your organisation has on the environment, even something small and reduce this impact and tell people…
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It’s That Festive Time of The Year, Environmental Practitioners Let’s Be Positive!
It’s the time of the year when we all start to feel a bit happier than usual, holidays are on their way and as such we can all recharge our batteries and spend some time with our friends and family. I think it’s easy when you are involved in environmental management to be miserable. In some ways I wonder if I am in the business of gloom and doom, after all the process of training people about environmental management generally starts off with a long trawl through how humanity is destroying the environment. From climate change, to waste production to plastic pollution etc we seem to be having a significant…
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Hints and Tips to Gain a Good Mark for NEBOSH Environmental Diploma Project
In this post I thought that we could look at some good practices with regards to the NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management project (known as NDEM2). For this assessment NEBOSH require you to review and critic an organisations environmental management system (EMS). The assignment is required to be approximately 8000 words and must be submitted to NEBOSH electronically. The pass mark is 50%. The Guide Although what NEBOSH requires sounds relatively straight forward to interpret, in practice there is a very specific format with regards to issues that are required to be covered. Therefore, one of the first things you MUST do is to download and thoroughly read the NDEM2 assignment…
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Preparing For The NEBOSH Environmental Diploma Exam
Preparing well for the NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management exam is essential if you want to do well, so in this post we are going to look at things that you can do to increase the chances of success in the exam and improve your confidence. The exam that you must complete is 3 hours in total and you have a choice of 5 questions out of a total of eight. The pass mark for the exam is 45%. Essentially doing the best you can in an exam is about two key factors: Having a good knowledge of the subject, and Being able to apply your knowledge to an exam…
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Tackling Issues of Sustainable Development with ISO 14001
A rather dry necessity routed in process and procedures? Something usually put in place because it is required by supply chain partners and clients? Or to get ahead in a procurement process? Or, is ISO 14001 an important piece of the sustainable development jigsaw – addressing environmental sustainability issues, engaging employees and customers, opening up new opportunities and markets and actually something that can be used to stimulate strategic and cultural change? It depends on how it is used and who is using it. I have always argued the second point – and the updated version of the environmental management standard ISO 14001 makes that argument more compelling. Treat it…
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Finding Info about The Environment Where You Live or Work
NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management Element 7 In this blog post I take a look at the key sources of information that can be accessed to understand the environment in an area. As you might be aware, it is generally a legal requirement for environmental information collected by public bodies to be made available to the public. Pretty much all of this information can be accessed for free on the internet. First we’ll look at the Environment Agency, who operate a site known as ‘what’s in your backyard’. Here you can access a broad range of environment related information covering issues such as flooding, nitrate vulnerable zones, landfill sites and…
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Are More Flood Defences The Answer?
NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management Element 11 The recent floods in late December 2015 and early January 2016 have been some of the worst on record. Many thousands of people have been affected and the cost of damage caused by the floods is projected to be over £1.5 billion. I thought in this blog post it would be interesting to take a look at what causes flooding and how flood risk can be managed. Historically, flooding was reduced by the building of flood defences for communities with little consideration of keeping water in uplands and flood plains. Such techniques might include building flood barriers (think the Thames Barrier) and installing…
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Environmental Impacts
Which is the fairest of them all? One area that has interested me lately is how impacts on the environment are costed. This topic is more important than you might think, as it is the basis of many environmental laws and taxes. So it relates to all three of the reasons for managing environmental risk, as introduced in Unit 1, Element 1 of the NEBOSH National Diploma in Environmental Management: moral, legal and financial. There are two ways of working out who pays for the costs associated with environmental impacts – and any accountants among you will recognise these terms: internalising the cost, or externalising it. What do these mean?…
