Would you believe that it is the auditing process?  Yes – because this forces continual improvement.  No one is perfect and a collection of well meaning people in a business are most unlikely to be perfect BUT if the business is ISO certified, mistakes are taken seriously, they examine WHY the mistake was possible and how to prevent it happening again.  They don’t just patch it up and patch it up again the next time, and the next time.  Then every 6 to 12 months an auditor walks in to check if they do what they says they do and he keeps asking questions like –“well, show me….”

I had my audit for both ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 again on Thursday, I did pass it, ad I did find a few areas I can improve in.  I actually enjoy this because it is an opportunity to have an outsider come in and look at my business behaviour and planning, and give me feedback.

ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 are about identifying where you potentially have risks of some form of business interruption, incident or even legal breach.  It is about planning and behaviour.  It’s about training and maintenance.  It’s about looking for the real reason that something happened.  It’s about preventing problems before they happen.  This is why ISO systems save money.  Sure when you do ISO 14001 and you include reducing your carbon footprint your power bills will also go down but prevention of interruptions and proactive planning is the real saver.  It is certainly not about locking yourself into mountains of paper of “having” to do things the way someone wrote it down.  That sort of system is a bad business choice.  My sort of ISO system is slimline and very simple because if it is not simple it won’t work!

I like the fact that ISO 14001 businesses are not perfect but are still accepted into a system of continual improvement then regularly checked in ongoing audits by skilled auditors.  I like the fact that my ISO 14001 clients successfully grow their businesses because of their better planning and behaviour.  You will like the fact that your business will be more efficient, you will reduce risk and you will save money.

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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The biggest breakthrough in improving human health has been providing drinking water that has been separated from waste water.  There are nasties in the gut that we do not want to circulate in our drinking water.  Checking that our drinking water is clean and safe to drink has been mainly by checking on the presence or absence of E. coli but has now been superseded by a preventive risk management approach.  Water shortages and a need to use recycled water has prompted a big push to improve the tools needed to ensure our drinking water is safe.

Essential first steps are providing a quantifiable definition of safety. Which is based on recognising that not all pathogens are created equal, some only cause mild diarrhoea while others such as E. coli  0157 can cause more severe symptoms including haemolytic uraemic syndrome and death.  And the definition of safety provides the goalposts that need to be achieved. using a risk management system. For use of recycled water include either reducing pathogen concentrations using treatment OR by reducing exposure through mechanisms such as how the water is used (eg, drip versus spray irrigation), applying buffer zones between points of use, and public access or crop restrictions (eg, irrigation of fruit trees rather than lettuce).

The guidelines describe typical reductions achieved by various types of treatment and exposure controls. This dual approach means that even sewage with relatively low levels of treatment can be used safely, provided appropriate end-use or on-site restrictions are applied. However, high-exposure uses such as dual reticulation will always rely on high levels of treatment.

In the risk management approach, monitoring focuses on checking that control measures work effectively. It relies on recoding contact time with chlorine which correlates with inactivation of enteric bacteria and viruses and removing turbidity by filtration correlates with removal of particles such as Cryptosporidium. The advantage of this approach is that the indicators can be measured continuously using automatic monitoring devices connected to alarm systems rather than relying on sampling.

This is based on a much more detailed paper by David Cunliffe provided courtesy of The Australian Society for Microbiology.

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Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Research commissioned by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, studied the impact of higher energy costs from the planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on a sample of Small to Medium Enterprises (SME’s) in the food processing, plastics and chemicals, and machinery and equipment manufacturing industries.

Big surprise!  The report found that the Australian emissions trading scheme could eat into the profits of small and medium businesses and may force owners to axe jobs.   What they forgot t mention is that SME’s can reduce their expenses by reducing their wasted carbon

“The concern is that as energy costs go up profitability declines, business will look at what areas they can make savings in terms of their expenses, and we’re concerned that labour would be one of those,” Mr Evans  from the Chamber said.

“Trade-exposed SME’s face prices set in the international markets, and hence will have no opportunity to pass the costs of CPRS to their customers.  And those SME’s selling to domestically will be constrained by the prices of imported goods,” the report said.

One of the things I have said repeatedly is that the Australian Government does not take proper account of the small end of town.  One could be cynical and say that jobs in the small end of town are not union jobs.

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Geologist Ian Plimer has labelled climate change theory an “ascientific, urban, religious, fundamentalist movement” promoted by academics and activists who would be “unemployable outside taxpayer-funded climate institutes”.

Plimer says that climate change has become the new Western religion with the elements of failed European socialism and Christianity and it imposes guilt on the community, creates a fear of damnation, demands appeasement by selling indulgences to the faithful, ignores any contrary information, demonises dissenters.”   This all sounds a bit UGH to me.

He is right that climate always changes and there have been greater and more rapid changes in the past and we’ve had varying carbon levels in the past.  But what is happening now is different and the atmospheric changes have been measured.   The current problem is superimposed on top of the history described by Plimer.

Climate change is not new -  it was predicted over 30 years ago to my certain knowledge because while my kids were small I taught secondary biology so I had school hours and holidays to fit in with my family.  I taught about global warming then.

However in Australia we have another “voice of reason” our Family First senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on climate change and apparently according to the “expert” the world is not warming now, and humans aren’t changing the climate.

The government and the country’s top scientists have tried to convince Senator Fielding, who holds a crucial vote in the upper house, that global warming is real.  But he’s released a document setting out his position and he says “Global temperature isn’t rising”

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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The US House of Representatives is about to vote on clean energy and climate legislation.  Thank Goodness say most of the world!  However it has really brought out the sceptics in force.

There are two types of sceptics (or skeptics):
-  The ultra conservatives who hate change even more than the rest of us and
-  The geologists whose research is largely funded by the mining and especially the coal and oil industry and we need to remember that geologists are trained to look DOWN at the soil, earth’s crust and BACK to the past and Atmospheric physicists look UP at the atmosphere and at what is happening NOW and in the future.

They have totally different training and most actually have less in common than a gynaecologist and a dentist and you would not dream of mixing those to groups of medical professionals up.  In Australia we have Professor Ian Plimer, a geologists much of whose work has discredited by many in the scientific community because it defies some of the laws of physics, publicising his new anti climate change book.

However the naysayers are having campaigns on TV and behind closed doors to scare politicians and put our children’s future at risk.

I would love the bulk of scientists who are warning us of the need for urgent action to be wrong but there is too much evidence they are right and the risk to my grandchildren is too great to take.  I refuse to gamble with their future!

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Tasmania is the world’s largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

About 500 farmers grow the crop supplying the market with about 50 per cent of the world’s raw material for morphine and related opiates.

The problem is that wild life and sometimes sheep get into the paddocks growing the opium poppies and eat poppy heads.  All walk round in circles but wallabies, a small version of a kangaroo, get into the crops and jump around in circles creating crop circles with their tails the poor things as they increasingly hop in circles eating the poppy heads and squashing the plants.

The security of Tasmania’s poppy stocks, are considered some of the safest in the world.

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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We all know that cattle and other ruminant animals have wind problem, mainly belches but definitely from both ends.  Their wind issue is about greenhouse gases not manners.  Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

There has been a lot of research happening on reducing this windy issue.  So how green is a “green” cow?  Most of the research into improved dairy farming is about improved genetic techniques and growth hormones.  People don’t like that either.

It is like the dilemma over nappies –which is worse filling landfills with disposable nappies or to wasting water and energy washing cloth ones?  I have 2 daughters and one is in each camp and having used cloth ones for my kids (a long time ago when there was little choice) I much prefer babysitting with the disposable ones available!

Another problem is the biofuels dilemma – if we make more fuel from crops to reduce oil consumption, are we really worse off by using up too much land, pesticides, fertilizer and tractor fuel in the process?  And starving some people into the bargain?  And driving Orang-utans to extinction?  I would love to get bio fuel made from algae grown on sewage farms.  We are not short of shit.

OK Back to Cows
•    1944, In the  U.S. dairying 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows.
•    2007, it produced 186 billion pounds of milk from 9.2 million cows.
That is a huge reduction and the volume of methane and nitrous oxide emissions has halved in that time. . Manure output is also down 24%.  So the total carbon footprint for dairy production shrunk by about 41%.

BUT the cost was increased use of the growth hormone recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) and using this on a million cows would further reduce carbon emissions equivalent to planting 300 million trees or taking 400,000 cars off the road. The European Union, a leader in the effort to curb climate change, bans the hormone because consumers don’t want this type of hormone in their food.

Another way to reduce methane from cows is to feed them fish oil which comes mostly from small fish already threatened by overfishing.  Fish oil also reduces the fat content of milk, so that you need more cows to produce the same amount of cheese

Personally I like to eat food that has been fed on “natural” foods and I have actually never seen cows going out to catch and eat fish.  We have already had horrific examples of that can happen when cows are fed meat.

There are some pretty tricky trade offs here.  And I’d like to see the figures for cattle that just craze on unimproved pastures,

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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The big emitters among Australian listed companies have spluttered long and loud about how their balance sheets would suffer if they were forcibly weaned off their carbon addiction.  However there appears to be a “chasm” between the dire predictions of the big polluters and their disclosure to the market of the perceived risks.   They are either being misleading about the extent of their exposures or are hiding price-sensitive information from their shareholders according to a “lie-detector test” by the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Climate Justice Program.

The document, called Corporate Climate Risk: Comparing Political Claims with Actual Disclosure to Shareholders, examines assertions by the likes of Bluescope Steel, Rio Tinto, Xstrata, Woodside Petroleum, Boral and Caltex that emissions trading would be disastrous for their Australian operations.   Dozens of unsubstantiated statements were found.
The ACCC has been asked to investigate if these companies are in breach of the Trade Practices Act and whether politicians, policymakers and the public have been deceived by Rio Tinto, Woodside and Xstrata, and others.

“Some of Australia’s biggest corporate polluters appear to be presenting the worst case to government and the public, in an effort to gain excessive free permits, while presenting the best case to investors, in order to keep their share prices up,” the reports’ authors found..
It will be interesting to see whether the ACCC will take on these companies who appear to have colluded to defraud the economy to the tune of $16.4 billion, as identified by recent RiskMetrics analysis.

A second form of price-fixing which needs to be considered is called a gross feed-in-tariff.

Which electricity retailers will pay grid-connected generators of renewable power ought to concern Greg Combet who failed to mention this tariff when he introduced legislation into Federal Parliament supporting an expansion of the Renewable Energy Target to only 20 per cent of our power supply by 2020.   Apparently in the absence of a gross feed-in-tariff, it could be 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020.

This would increase jobs and investment and it is a do-able scenario – just not in the union dominated coal industry.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see politicians and industry genuinely pulling together to get the best outcome for the future instead of leaving us with the question of who is squeezing who where?  And the disastrous status quo being maintained.

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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THE impact of climate change will be a major talking point for international firefighting experts in Sydney from as far away as the United States, Europe and Asia are attending a two-day conference to look at issues such as how to improve technology and research, as well as community safety.
NSW Emergency Service minister Steve Whan said “Given the forecast impact of climate change on fire patterns and the threat of wildfire to so many communities around the globe, this important conference comes at a critical time to help the way we fight wildfires in the future.

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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“Basically a tipping point means that a system is not going to respond in a nice smooth way to increased CO2 in the atmosphere or increased temperature,” Professor Will Steffen said.
“You can see temperature rise, temperature rise, and nothing happening to a system”.  “Natural systems do this. [An example] is the Great Barrier Reef – a big natural ecosystem which is resilient to a point but once you pass that point, then it will change very quickly.”  The Indian Monsoon is another example he mentioned.

A bit like  a see-saw really – ok as you add more then suddenly you tip – I think we mostly tried that as a child and felt the thud as we landed.  Climate tipping is far more serious.

The report from the Copenhagen scientific meeting was deeply concerned that we are reaching some tipping points and lends a sense of urgency to the upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

We need a widely agreed road map that includes the big developing countries like China and India as well as the major players in the industrialised world like the United States.  There is not time to wait for another round of negotiations.

envirojean

Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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