California businesses operate in a heavily regulated environment, including for issues relating to EHS compliance. The state places great emphasis on occupational safety for workers and protecting the environment, and by extension, the public.
Its approach includes new legislation and standards that may even be stricter than federal standards. If you’re a business in California, you should pay special attention to this fact. California businesses not only have to worry about Federal EHS standards, but they also have to worry about making sure that they stay updated on the always-changing regulatory landscape in the state.
In this article, we discuss the unique challenges facing Californian businesses regarding EHS and how the experts at CDMS can help you navigate these challenges. Read on to learn more.
Why EHS Compliance Matters for California Businesses?
EHS compliance in California is becoming increasingly important for businesses in the state. California places heavy emphasis on EHS regulation and the state regularly passes new laws designed to promote, enforce, and raise EHS compliance standards.
Examples of these laws include the Enterprise-Wide and Egregious Violations rule. These laws mean that businesses should be careful to ensure that they are always one step ahead of regulation to ensure that they don’t have to pay hefty penalties or score low on independent EHS audits.
If you own a business in California, you have to worry about meeting the standards of myriad EHS regulations for occupational safety and environmental safety. These include federal, state, and local laws. Quite often some of the standards imposed by California are even higher than those enforced on the federal level.
EHS Compliance Challenges for California Businesses
The main challenge facing Californian businesses is the ever-changing regulatory landscape in addition to the complexity of laws and standards. In fact, California has been described as “the most heavily regulated state in the nation” according to one report.
To make things even more complicated, EHS compliance is governed by a range of Federal bodies and their state-level equivalents, such as:
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) and Cal OSHA
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Cal EPA
- Department of Transportation (DOT)
In addition to this, these regulations are enforced on a local level by bodies known as CUPAs, which is short for Certified Unified Program Agencies. California is also well-known for frequently being even tougher than Federal requirements. All these combined can present severe challenges to overcome.
Here is a summary of the challenges these factors result in for businesses based in California.
– A lack of expertise to follow regulations
Small or even medium-sized companies may not have enough staff to run daily operations and monitor compliance with EHS standards at the same time.
– Laws may be too complicated to comprehend
With the numerous current laws and the new ones being passed, businesses may not have the legal or EHS expertise to know what they are doing wrong.
– Laws in the state may be growing too burdensome
California has a reputation for enforcing standards that may be even stricter than Federal obligations. This can be seen in laws such as the Enterprise-Wide and Egregious Violations rule.
– Increased cost
With more regulation comes more costs. This may directly affect the bottomline of your company, making the state too expensive to do business in.
– Growing importance of environmental protection
More and more importance is being placed on protecting the environment and the cost of the protection is being passed on to businesses and manufacturers who put that environment at risk. Increasing government commitment to promoting environmental values may mean that regulations and the costs associated with them.
How to Overcome EHS Compliance Challenges?
Keeping up with the growing complexity of EHS regulation in California can be challenging. However, putting a system in place to monitor and improve compliance and making deliberate efforts to remain updated with California EHS regulations can help you deal with these challenges.
Here are a few steps that you should follow to ensure that you can overcome compliance challenges:
- Identify the regulations. The first step is to make sure that you know the laws that are applicable to your business. This knowledge will give you the raw data that you need to start putting measures and systems in place to ensure EHS compliance.
- Understand the requirements. After learning the sets of laws that apply to your business, you should take care to fully understand them. EHS laws and regulations vary in terms of what areas of your business they control or even the department in charge. Only by understanding all these factors can you be in a position to be EHS compliant.
- Prove your compliance. Internal audits represent self-assessments that can be used as official proof that your company is acting above board. They help verify your EHS compliance and can be used for important processes such as applying for insurance coverage. The higher your score, the lower your insurance premiums.
- Put in place a system of accountability. Delegating responsibility for EHS compliance to specific employees in managerial positions is the most effective way to ensure that you remain on the right side of EHS regulation and that you are making necessary progress.
- Monitor developments in EHS standards and regulations. You don’t want to get caught unprepared by changing regulations. You know what they say, “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” This means you and your management have the responsibility to pay attention to changing laws in the state or local jurisdiction within which you operate.
You can handle this in one of two ways. You can assign an individual with the responsibility to monitor EHS laws as mentioned earlier. The second option is hiring outside experts who have a team focusing on EHS and can do this in a cost-effective manner. One such option is what we offer here at CDMS.
Conclusion
California EHS regulations are complicated and are getting tougher and tougher. They represent a growing cost and risks to businesses in California. These complicated laws and ever-changing rules make it difficult for companies to track.
Small or even medium-sized firms may not have the expertise required to ensure that they remain on the right side of these regulations. Hiring EHS compliance services such as what we offer here at CDMS represents a cost-effective and efficient alternative. Get in touch with one of our experts today.
