Facility & Global Environmental Management and Renewable Energy

Facility & Global Environmental Management and Renewable Energy

The management of environmental issues is extremely important for any facility. Environmental management begins before a property is developed, extends through the life of the property, and continues through its recycling and redevelopment. If there is any failure it can turn a valuable property asset into a major liability for years to come resulting in huge amounts of capital to fix the issue. It is the facility manager's responsibility to implement necessary measures to reduce environmental risks. To counter such risks most facility managers will implement some type of an environmental management plan dealing with the facility or global environment.

An environmental management plan is customized to meet the property's current use by tenants or in-house personnel if the property is owned and managed by the same entity. The plan must also reflect past use by previous owners and the use of surrounding properties, and it must be based on the property's current environmental condition. Environmental management plans also require interviewing tenants and inspecting their work spaces to discover and record environmental compliance issues and to review tenants' emergency action plans. Environmental problems can occur on the land surrounding a building as well as inside the building itself such as soil contamination, water contamination, groundwater contamination, and microwave & electromagnetic hazards. These problems will lead to environmental issues such as indoor air quality issues, air pollution, hazards cause by building materials, hazards caused by waste generation, building habitation contamination, and building use contamination. Major areas of concern are contamination of the property site or building. If a site or building is contaminated it may have restrictions placed on it while strategies are implemented to fix the area of concern causing the value of the property to decrease...