Environmental Catalogues
Six curated lists supply the vocabulary an environmental record is assembled from. All six share one shape — code, name, description, active — plus the one or two fields each carries of its own, and all six support Excel export, Excel import and bulk delete.
| Catalogue | Supplies | Extra field |
|---|---|---|
| Environmental aspects | What the interaction is | Category |
| Environmental impacts | What the interaction causes | Impact area |
| Control methods | How an aspect is controlled | Method type |
| Compliance obligations | Which requirements apply | Type, article reference, effective date, link |
| Life cycle stages | Where in the life cycle it arises | Sort order |
| Operating conditions | Under what conditions | — |
Environmental aspects
The interactions themselves — what the organization does that touches the environment.
Each aspect carries a category, and the seven categories are fixed rather than a list you curate:
| Category | Covers |
|---|---|
| Air emission | Stack and fugitive emissions, including greenhouse gases |
| Water discharge | Effluent to sewer, surface water, ground |
| Waste | Hazardous and non-hazardous, generation and disposal |
| Soil and groundwater | Contamination, spill, leaching |
| Resource consumption | Energy, water, raw material, including energy use |
| Physical agent | Noise, vibration, odour, light, heat |
| Land and ecosystem | Land use, habitat, biodiversity |
Greenhouse gases sit under air emission and energy use under resource consumption rather than each opening a category of its own. The taxonomy is deliberately non-overlapping, so an aspect has exactly one right answer — which is what makes reporting by category meaningful.
The aspect catalogue is not seeded. It is the taxonomy your organization curates, and it arrives as an Excel template to fill in rather than a starting list to edit.
Environmental impacts
What an aspect causes. Each carries an impact area — one of air, water, soil, resource, climate, ecosystem, human health or society.
Aspect and impact are separate lists, and one aspect commonly causes several impacts. Each pairing is a record of its own, because the severity of the same emission differs by which impact you are assessing.
Also not seeded — the same reasoning as aspects.
Control methods
How an aspect is controlled. Each carries a method type, and the five types are in the standard's own order of effectiveness:
| Order | Type | Approach |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Prevention at source | Stop the interaction happening. |
| 2 | Engineering control | Treat, contain or abate it. |
| 3 | Administrative control | Procedures, training, permits. |
| 4 | Monitoring and measurement | Know what it is doing. |
| 5 | Emergency response | Limit the consequence when it goes wrong. |
Read this the way safety reads its hierarchy of controls. A register controlled mostly by monitoring and emergency response is not controlled — it is watched.
Not seeded; supplied as a template.
Compliance obligations
The widest of the six. This is your register of legal, contractual and corporate requirements:
- Obligation type — legal, contractual, or corporate commitment.
- Article reference — the clause or article within the instrument.
- Effective date — when it takes effect.
- Link — the published text.
It is a central list rather than free text on each record for one reason: so that "this regulation changed — which of our aspects does it touch?" answers with a single filter. See Reports.
Not seeded — your obligations are yours by definition.
Enter obligations at the clause level you actually manage against, and put the numeric limit in the description. A row per whole regulation is easy to create and useless to filter by.
Life cycle stages
Where in the life cycle an aspect arises. Part of a record's six-part key, so the same aspect at supply and at end-of-life are two assessments.
Seeded, because it is the standard's own closed list:
| Order | Stage |
|---|---|
| 1 | Raw material and input supply |
| 2 | Inbound logistics |
| 3 | Production / service delivery |
| 4 | Outbound logistics and distribution |
| 5 | Product use |
| 6 | End of life / waste management |
The sort order is what reports and pickers read down, so keep it in life cycle order.
Operating conditions
Under what conditions the aspect arises — also part of the key, because the same aspect scores very differently by condition.
Seeded, and extensible:
| Condition | Covers |
|---|---|
| Normal | Routine, planned conditions. |
| Abnormal | Start-up, shutdown, maintenance, breakdown. |
| Emergency | Accident, spill, fire, natural disaster. |
The abnormal and emergency rows are where most registers are thin, and where auditors look. A boiler assessed only under normal operation has not been assessed — start-up is usually its worst hour.
Why four of the six are not seeded
Content the module cannot run without ships as a seed. Content you curate ships as an Excel template.
Life cycle stages and operating conditions are the standard's own lists and the module needs them to build a key, so they arrive filled in. Aspects, impacts, control methods and obligations are your taxonomy — a starting list would be one you had to review, edit and partly delete before it was yours, which is more work than filling in a template.
The pickers are flat
The record form's aspect, impact and control-method pickers show their catalogues flat. Nothing narrows the impact list by the aspect you chose.
That puts the weight on search and filtering, which is why every definition screen has both, and why keeping the catalogues at a usable length matters.
Excel import and export
Every one of the six exports to Excel and re-loads from a filled-in template. Leave the code column blank and the code is issued from that list's number template.
Bulk delete refuses the whole selection when any row is in use by a record — it does not delete what it can and skip the rest, because a partial delete leaves nobody able to say what happened.