Brilliant Business Ideas

Wondering if your business needs an environmental assessment? Curious about what an assessment entails? Assessments generally involve analysing a situation, a piece of land or a process to determine its potential effect on the environment. Here are four signs your business needs an environmental assessment.

1. You're Developing Land

If you've bought a piece of land and you want to develop it for residential or commercial purposes, you may want to do an environmental assessment before you get started. In particular, if the land has been used for industrial or agricultural purposes, you may want to do an assessment to make sure that there are no lingering chemicals or toxins in the land.

At the same time, even if there has just been a house on the property previously, you may want to get an assessment. Many older homes have toxins such as lead or asbestos, and if that's in the soil due to the demolition of the home, you need to know that before you get started on excavation and construction.

2. You're Concerned About Local Environmental Rules

In many cases, your business has to adhere to local or federal environmental regulations. Those regulations may deal with how you dispose of chemical byproducts or other types of industrial waste. They may deal with efficiency standards on HVAC systems, leaking refrigerant from commercial refrigerators or thousands of other elements. If you want to ensure you are on the right side of the law, you may want to contact an environmental assessment expert to look over what you are doing and make sure that you're legally compliant.

3. You're Shaping Your Corporate Social Responsibility Plan

As a business owner, you can no longer just create a product or service and let it speak for itself. Contemporary consumers now crave transparency. They want to ensure that the companies they patronise are socially and environmentally responsible.

To attract these savvy consumers, you need a corporate social responsibility plan. To shape that, you may want to have your production processes or services assessed from an environmental standpoint. Then, you can share that information with clients and prospective customers to make them more confident about doing business with you.

4. You Want to Mitigate Environmental Issues

In some cases, you may know that your processes are having a negative effect on the environment, and in these cases, an assessment can also be useful. The assessor can let you know about the extent of the impact your processes are having, and he or she can give you tips on how to mitigate those effects.