Environmental management

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Environmental management
As a business you could have some impact on the environment, whether large or small. Managing your impact as well as your environmental responsibilities can ensure your business is environmentally friendly and reaping the added benefits.

Business benefits and planning
Businesses with successful environmental management plans and practices not only help the environment but can also introduce significant benefits for their own business.
- Business benefits
  By introducing sound environmental management practices and reducing your environmental impact overall, your business can profit from cost savings through efficiency or productivity gains.
- Environmental planning
  Planning for your business is an important part of ensuring your business' success. Likewise, when you decide to make your business more environmentally friendly, you can expand your business plan to include environmental management strategies.
Licences and labelling
To ensure your business and the environment is protected, you need to know if your business activities fall under environmental legislation, licensing and labelling requirements.
- Environmental legislation
  All Australian businesses can play a part in environmental management, but whether environmental laws will affect your business directly will depend on your business activities.
- Licences & permits
  Approvals for environmental licences and permits can be obtained from federal, state and local environmental agencies, and the type of approval you need will depend on the jurisdiction and type of your business activity.
- Standards and labelling
  Certain goods or appliances manufactured or imported into Australia may need to comply with environmental standards before they can be sold. Each standard sets out a rating and labelling system to inform consumers on how efficiently a product uses an environmental resource, and has the added benefit of promoting suppliers with high rating products.
Minimising your impact
Without proper environmental management, businesses will have some degree of impact on the environment. There are however various ways you can minimise your impact and create significant savings for your business. Federal and state governments also provide various tools to help you achieve these savings.
- Reporting
  Before you can reduce your impact on the environment, you need to know which areas of your business are causing the most impact.
- Sustainability
  A way of reducing your business' impact on the environment is by using sustainable or renewable resources. By doing this, you can preserve resources for future generations.
- Recycling
  One of the simplest ways to minimise your business impact on the environment is to employ sound recycling practices. Not only does recycling reduce pollution, it conserves materials not easily replaced in the future.
- Waste reduction
  Developing or improving your waste management system can save you money, increase the efficiency of your workflow and improve the reputation of your business.
- Tools and resources
  Federal and state governments have a number of online tools, calculators, guides and databases available to help you make your business sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Environment grants and assistance
You can access grants and other funding programs for environmental projects from federal, state and territory governments and in some cases from your local council.
- Federal government environment grants & funding
  This page provides an alphabetical listing of federal environmental grants and other assistance.
- State and territory environment grants and funding
  This page provides a listing of state and territory environmental grants and other assistance.
- Advice, support & awards
  You can take advantage of a broad range of advice, support and awards offered by the Australian Government.