As anyone who has attended a majority of the classroom-based courses that I have delivered will know; I believe a case study from the past can assist in helping students understand the problems of today. This can be a great learning experience. In regards to air pollution, I’m not aware of a better case study than that of The Great London Smog of 1952. The Great London Smog of 1952 The Great London Smog occurred in December 1952 and resulted in the deaths of around 12,000 people, and thousands of people became ill. The smog occurred for a period of 14 days in total. In the UK this case study…
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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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Corporate Social Responsibility
Power to the People – Take Two Thinking about Corporate Social Responsibility and how the motivation for it is mainly moral, or ethical – as outlined in Element 2, Unit 1 of the NEBOSH Environmental Certificate – I was interested in the recent tongue-lashing the UK government received from the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) over its plans to introduce a 5p charge on single-use plastic bags from 2015. On the face of it this seems a little harsh, given that plastic bags have been highlighted as a conspicuous waste of resources and an insidious source of pollution for many years. The EU Commission estimates that 800,000 tonnes of plastic…
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Natural Cycles and Their Delicate Environmental Balance
Being quite a keen cyclist I want to talk to you about natural cycles – no, not about biking around the countryside but how substances and elements are moved around in nature. If you research how long the planet has been in existence you will come up with a figure of 4 billon years, give or take a few million. Yet, even after all this time, substances on which nature relies to exist have not been consumed. This seems a little odd, when you think about it – 4 billon years is a very long time. But it’s because Earth is essentially a closed-loop system: very little gets in and…
