What is an environmental gorilla?When it comes to environmental issues, many facilities are primarily focused on environmental compliance – let’s make sure we meet our permit limits. Let’s stay out of trouble - today. While environmental compliance is an important aspect of environmental management, it should not be the sole focus of a facility. Each facility should also actively reduce its risk of potentially significant future environmental liabilities on a daily basis. The easiest way to start is to manage your environmental gorillas.
According to Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of the best-selling book The Invisible Gorilla, “Imagine you are asked to watch a short video in which six people – three in white shirts and three in black shirts – pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?”
Well according to the authors, when they conducted this experiment at Harvard University a few years ago, half of the people that watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla!
This experiment reveals a significant behavioral tendency - we are not aware of a lot of things around us, and we do not recognize this lack of awareness. This causes many of us to simply overlook the obvious.
Here is a state-of-the-art chemical mix room with all of the “bells and whistles.” This facility was proud of the investment that it made to protect the environment by ensuring any release from drums and totes stored in this area would be contained by the trenches and sumps within the self-contained chemical mix room. The trenches and sumps actually contained sensors that would sound an alarm if any released material entered the structures.
The supply chain crisis has reached into seemingly all levels of life these days. From supermarket shelves to manufacturers running out of raw materials, it’s an ongoing crisis. But there is another crisis facing many American manufacturers: a shortage of workers, including at the management level. EH&S managers are especially in short supply. And not having someone full-time and qualified on staff to fill that role can wreak havoc on a company’s EH&S policies. Fortunately, there are some solutions.
As a facility or plant manager, you might feel like you have an adversarial relationship with local, state, and federal regulators. And when they are scheduled to come on-site for an inspection, it could send you into panic mode as you try to “fix” everything before they arrive. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, you can have a facility where an inspection is like a mere formality because the regulator won’t find much of anything amiss. Getting to that point requires some prep work and thinking proactively about how you and your team deal with EH&S issues.