ISO 14000 Compliance with FMECA principles and Environmental Impact Assessment

Sustainable development and Environmental Management System (EMS) are strongly encouraged by rules and regulation able to engage industries to become more respectful of environmental safety. In order to apply the first step of an EMS implementation, we’ve defined a method able to reduce the difficulties met during the application of the Italian EMAS’s guidelines about the Initial Environmental Analysis; according to these directives it’s necessary, to examine and evaluate the environmental damage produced by a firm (EIA), utilising a matrix G having, as rows, the processing cycles and, as columns, the main environmental aspects. To avoid falling in indecision’s mistakes in our study we have introduced an analytical method so we are able to evaluate Gi,j as a number rather than as an adjective attributed by personal opinions. At last we’ve defined a path to plan and manage the corrective solutions (K) able to bound the environmental damage produced on the aspect j; in detail, using the EIA’s results, we propose to assign a weight Wi,k to each solutions k representing the elements of third dimension of the matrix G. In order to calculate Wi,k we have applied a FMECA to environmental damages defining an analytical criteria based on three parameters. The proposal methods have been verified in a well known firm producing electronic components and smart cards obtaining a simplification of EMS implementation and a time reduction of the following audits.