ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT AND

SUSTAINABILITY DEVELOPMENT
ASSIGNMENT

Submitted to

Mrs. Lekshmi R. Kumar

Associate Professor
Asian School of Business

As an Assignment in
Environmental Management & Sustainability
Submitted by

Anika Varkey
Reg. No.: 18
Zubair Nazir
Reg. No.: 20

CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY............................................................................................ 3
TQEM DEFINED....................................................................................................... 4
OBJECTIVES OF TQEM............................................................................................. 5
BASIC ELEMENTS OF TQEM..................................................................................... 5
ADVANTAGES OF IMPLEMENTING TQEM..................................................................6
IMPLEMENTING A TQEM PROGRAM..........................................................................7
TQEM AND THE NATURAL STEP MODEL..................................................................10
MEASUREMENTS AND HOW TO USE THEM..............................................................10
CONCLUSION........................................................................................................ 11
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................... 12

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The growing concern to maintain and improve the quality of the natural environment and to
protect human health make it important for the organizations to achieve and demonstrate
environmental performance by controlling the environmental impacts of their activities and
products.
Historically, businesses were reactive and sought end-of-pipe solutions to environmental
issues faced. They attempted to comply with environmental regulations by treating and
disposing pollutants after they are generated. Time and experience have shown that this
approach towards environment management is costly and offered no guarantee that
promulgated standards can be met, so environmental issues which are critical to business
should not be managed separately rather have to be integrated as one priority to be addressed
in business planning. The investments for a proactive environmental programme not only do
not exceed the costs of non-compliance with law or liability costs, but is an opportunity to
increase profits and improve the company image.
TQEM has emerged from integrating strategic Environmental Management (EM) into the
holistic approach of Total Quality Management (TQM). This Report explains the elements of
a TQEM system, describes how to build a TQEM system within a business also sums up the
benefits of incorporating a TQEM system in your company.
TQEM embodies four key principles: customer identification, continuous improvement,
doing the job right the first time and a system approach. Benefits of implementing TQEM
include increased efficiency, reduced waste, conservation of resources and increased
profitability. For a business, being perceived as green is good for public relations and will
also increase employee morale.
TQEM is necessarily a change in the corporate system. It requires full and open
communications with all stakeholders in policy decisions. These two characteristics impart
the responsibility of implementation of TQEM on upper management. TQEM supports
continuous improvement of corporate environmental performance. Companies that have
already implemented TQM programs will find it relatively easy to satisfy the requirements of
TQEM. A system of checks and balances, using QC tools, provides the review and feedback
needed to continuously improve the overall system.

TQEM DEFINED
The process of applying TQM to corporate environmental strategies has been identified as
Total Quality Environmental Management (TQEM). Total quality management is an
approach which places the emphasis on quality at its highest standard and assumes that higher
quality satisfies customers and increases the utility for their workers and society also ensuring
the long term success of the company. For a company in which TQM already exist as a
driving philosophy, TQEM is an approach to integrate environmental management into TQM
management system. Fundamental to TQEM is the recognition that pollution, irrespective of
its type and form, is waste.
The TQEM philosophy has three strategic goals:
(i)

To develop basic strategies and standards for corporate environmental performance

(ii)
(iii)
(iv)

which are the base for all others.

Continuous improvement ,
Defect (waste) prevention while enhancing value added activities and
Meeting or exceeding customer requirements.

TQM is a market oriented concept which focuses on customer satisfaction as the purpose of
the work. Customer includes both internal (employees) and external customer (who purchase
and uses companys product) satisfaction. TQEM expands this concept to include other
external customers such as regulatory agencies and neighbouring communities who are
concerned about the environmental performance.
Total Quality Environmental Management (TQEM) principles focus on creating for a
business, an ability to generate profit from an environmentally constrained world. TQEM
seeks to capitalize on the profits to be gained from environmental excellence by abandoning
policies based on regulatory compliance. Regulatory compliance policies accept pollution as
a necessary cost. Pollution can be seen as a source of inefficiency and waste which, if
eliminated through insightful product design and process study, can provide competitive
advantage through the elimination of fixed costs associated with inefficient end-of-pipe
solutions. TQEM introduces the systems for continual process study and motivates the
introduction of environmental considerations to the design stage.

OBJECTIVES OF TQEM
The objectives of Total Quality Environmental Management are to:

Reduce waste and improve continuously,

Reduce resource depletion,

Reduce or eliminate environmental pollution,

Design products for minimal environmental impact in production, use and disposal,

Control environmental impact of raw material sourcing,

Control environmental impact of new developments,

Promote environmental awareness among employees and

Promote environmental awareness within the community.

BASIC ELEMENTS OF TQEM

Identify your customers/stakeholders: Total quality is based on the theory that the
customer is always right. Even Quality should be defined by the needs of
customers/stakeholders; they can be external or internal. As for TQM, the environmental
programmes also focus on the process in order to eliminate, all possible inefficiencies,
keeping in mind the final customer. The external customers are the buyers, the local
community, environmental groups, regulators & general public on the other hand the
internal customers are represented by companys employees.
Continuous improvement: The Companys management and employees should work
systematically towards the improvement of environmental performance. The continuous
quality improvement always requires the identification of the benchmarks, as well as the
measurements involved and the monitoring of the progress which are mainly towards
meeting targets. It is important to include an assessment in the three perspectives which
are improvements in processes and products environmental results, as well as customer
satisfaction. There should be systematic ongoing effort to improve business process and
continuous improvement changes to entire corporate perspective. Company-wide
employee involvement in TQEM is a key to success.

 Do the job right the first time: TQEM supports the elimination of the environmental
risks. It is essential to recognize and eliminate environmental problems before they occur,
so employees should seek to identify these risks. The best way for a pound of
environmental crises is an ounce of prevention.
The cost of quality is the cost that quality imposes on the company. In the environmental
management, these costs are those of generating wastes that do not add to it may even
reduce the value of the product of service the organization is providing.
Take a systems approach to work: By complete observation and analysis of the
organizational system allows its definition of a team with the representatives from all the
areas of the organization. TQEM proposes to look at each part of the environmental
management as a system. This system includes all of the resources like the equipments
and people who must work together in order to achieve the desired objectives of the
organization. Also the observation of the whole organization and working together as an
integrated team are a condition for recording all the critical factors and the subsequent
operation of the system. It is important to design all components of the TQEM system so
that they function together and support each other in achieving desired goals.
Total quality forces organisations to work across the organization boundaries by forming
teams that represent all of the functions involved in the making of a system work as planned.

ADVANTAGES OF IMPLEMENTING TQEM

Revenue and market share will be lost when an organisations customers switch to
competitors greener products. When introduction of new products are paused due to changing
regulations, or when manufacturing plants or sites are shut down by legal actions. When
regulations ask for major changes in products, services or facilities, or when other unexpected
liabilities are uncovered or when heavy fines and penalties are imposed, operating cost for the
organisation will rise.
Some of the advantages that can be reaped by companies and business by developing
environmental management system based on the principles of TQEM are:

 By implementing TQEM, efficiency can be increased, waste can be reduced and

resources can be conserved which lead to increased profitability.
As society today has become an environmentally conscious society, being perceived as
green is good for public relations and will also increase employee morale.
Another reason for implementing TQEM is to attempt to be proactive towards
government mandates and government regulations and thus preventing legal implications
and penalties. A corporation, by instituting a TQEM program, can argue that it is doing
everything possible to improve its environment scorecard.
Brings immediate cost savings without large investment
Helps heal a sick planet
Promotes monetary incentives from government

IMPLEMENTING A TQEM PROGRAM

A TQEM system cannot be implemented overnight. Rather process should become an
evolution in the culture of the organisation. Small steps have to be taken to begin. TQEM
implementation should begin and end with a commitment of satisfying internal and external
customers of the organisation.
(i)

Assess companys status: Examine companys current situation in terms of both its
environmental opportunities (and vulnerabilities) and its quality practices.
Assess companys commitment to quality and customer orientation.
Assess competitors environmental management systems and see whether they
have marked better environmental management systems
Commitment of top management to improved environmental performance.
Readiness of top management to translate this commitment into action.
Middle managements support to implement a TQEM strategy
Find out the skeptics and ways to gain their support.
Assessing this parameters will help company to understand where it is needed to build
support, what training is needed, and where some of the improvement opportunities
may be.

(ii)

Identify customer: Focus on the customer groups that are most critical to your
company and your program. Improvement efforts should be directed toward your
customers highest priorities. Many TQEM programs initially focus on regulatory
agencies as their primary external customers as they believe that nothing can be
undertaken until regulators are satisfied. Identifying internal and external customers

will help define organizations products and services and your measures of
performance. This is a critical step.

(iii)

Learn to use PDCA: Once status of the organisation has been assessed, customers
are identified and improvement objectives are set, an action plan to begin the process
of continuous improvement have to be developed. One widely-used tool for
developing an action plan is the P-D-C-A cycle.

(iv)
The following factors make up the P-D-C-A cycle:

a. Plan: Identify customers, the customers requirements, and how well your systems
provide results that meet their requirements. Build your improvement plan on data
and measurements.
b. Do: Follow your plan. Avoid inserting changes at this point. If a major change
becomes necessary, start again at Step 1 (Plan).
c. Check: Observe and measure the effects of the changes you instituted, preferably
on a small pilot scale to minimize disruptions. Use statistical tools whenever
possible to measure the results to determine if they prove or disprove your
hypotheses.
d. Act: Make changes in the process to reflect what you have learned; this step
translates the learning into a systemic improvement.
e. Repeat: Repeat the P-D-C-A cycle incorporating the knowledge gained. Continue
the cycle, delivering ever greater quality from increasingly robust processes.
(v)

Learn to use TQEM tools: At the operational level, TQEM involves the adoption of
certain management tools or processes. Use TQM Tools to discover opportunities
for pollution prevention and to measure the effectiveness of improvements
organization make, as well as to improve the work processes within your
organization. This tools help to put data in an easily understood format that identifies
and clarifies underlying causes.
In a TQEM program, each tool serves a different purpose. When used in conjunction
with each other, the tools:
Identify opportunities for pollution prevention,
Determine probable causes for the pollution,
Establish the level of pollution that is inherently expected from the process,
and lay out the course of action to prevent the pollution from occurring.

The tools of TQEM are identical to those used in any TQM program and include the
following:
a. Cause and Effect Diagram: A qualitative summary of all potential causes of a
problem. The Root Cause of a Waste, Toxic Substance Use or Emission can be
analysed using tool.
b. Pareto Chart: A graphic tool that organizes data to identify and focus on major
problems. The Pareto principle is the principle that 20 per cent of the sources
cause 80 per cent of the problems. By implementing this tool company can
analyse where to start with, which area should be given priority to, which cause
should be treated so as to solve maximum of problems.
Analysis of the Pareto Chart and Cause and Effect Diagram can help the company
identify problem areas and causes for environmental problems.
c. Control Chart: A control chart is a statistical tool for the analysis of data
obtained during a continuing process. Can be used to analyse the process by
measuring the inherent variability of waste generation that is expected from the
process. Anything beyond a level of variability is not acceptable and this abnormal
patterns or points outside the limits on the control alert the TQEM team to specific
areas for investigation and can be investigated with the Cause and Effect Diagram.

TQEM AND THE NATURAL STEP MODEL

It is a basic, experimentally based way to deal with sustainable development that empowers
environmental frameworks thinking inside organizations, governments and scholarly
foundations. It is established on two standards, to be specific
1

Basic science principles :

Matter and energy can't be made or annihilated.
Matter and energy have a tendency to scatter.
A net increment in material quality on Earth can be delivered just by sun-driven
procedures.
We never devour energy or matter - just its energy, purity and structure.
The requirement of our lives:
Humanity cannot bear repeated humiliation of the environment

MEASUREMENTS AND HOW TO USE THEM

Whenever you implement a new environmental measurement system, or change an old one,
you should simultaneously identify measures that will tell you if the system is delivering the
desired results. A company can use measurements to, among other things, get feedback on
how customers are responding to the changes. Measuring your customers' opinions of your
product or service will, over time, tell you if your improvement efforts are really addressing
your customers' needs.
Measurements may be both direct and indirect. Select measures that truly monitor
performance and improvement: company must be able to know how well they are meeting
their customers' requirements even as they reduce their own costs and improve their
workplace environment.
As is the case with most companies, measurement process should include such diverse topics
as:

Percentage of trained personnel

Total personnel
Total production
Total liquid and solid waste.
Total safety and environmental expenses and investments
Energy use

Use numerical measures and tools such as histograms, Pareto charts, and statistical control
charts whenever possible both to improve management oversight and to strengthen the
credibility of the process. Measuring progress and sharing results as TQEM evolves affects
the process significantly by documenting accomplishments, identifying areas for
improvement, inspiring pride and encouraging momentum, justifying the need for more
resources, and providing information for other needs.

CONCLUSION
Environmental and quality management have become an important part of businesses all over
the world. This involves changes in understanding and practice at all levels of the
organisation and requires the training of the workforce, recognition by senior management
that the workforce can contribute and are essential to gaining quality enhancement, and also
that customers are important stakeholders, who must be satisfied with all aspects of the

operation. There has been an increasing demand for the manufacturing industry to implement
sustainable production policies. To meet this demand, environmental management plays an
important role as part of the total quality management system of the company. To enhance the
environmental management, the total quality environmental management system must be
successfully implemented. TQEM can be summed up in less than a dozen words.

No matter how good you are, you can always be better

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), 1993. Total Quality Environmental
Management: The Primer, Washington, DC.
Affisco, J. F. (1998). TQEM - methods for continuous environmental
improvement. Handbook of Total Quality Management, 388-408. doi:10.1007/978-1-46155281-9_18
Carpenter, George D. [Chairman of GEMI]. Total Quality Management: A Journey to
Environmental Excellence. Environment Today: May, 1991
Deltas, G., Harrington, D. R., & Khanna, M. (2013). Green management and the nature of
pollution prevention innovation. Applied Economics, 46(5), 465-482.
doi:10.1080/00036846.2013.857004
Skerlos , S. J., Professor . (2000). TQEM and DFE: Applications of Industrial Ecology for
Business . Journal of Industrial Ecology, 18(5), 684-686. doi:10.1111/jiec.12134