Ever since that first Earth Day in 1970, the pressures on private companies and government jurisdictions to do right by Mother Nature have grown. Indeed, they've grown exponentially. For more than 35 years now, myriad environmental regulations have worked hand-in-glove with savvy, informed citizens to compel both business and the public sector to take better care of the planet. On balance, this has been beneficial, especially considering global warming and other looming crises.

However, to appease regulatory agencies, avoid fines and assuage a public with ever-growing demands, virtually all organizations whose activities could taint the land, water or air have come to employ environmental officers - sometimes whole departments - that labor to ensure compliance with laws, mollify citizen groups and even team with lawyers when their organizations get mired in pollution-related court battles. Such a business strategy, necessary and progressive as it might have seemed 10 years ago, drives up costs.

"Companies that keep doing business this way probably won't be around in another 10 or 15 years," says John Kinsella, a Bothell-based vice president and consultant with Shaw Environmental. "Organizations who want to succeed - whether it's with their bottom lines or with their voters - will need to develop effective environmental programs. Simply reacting to problems, waiting for regulators to come along and hit them with fines and then fixing what went wrong after the fact will not get them anywhere close to achieving meaningful environmental goals."

Since 1996, Kinsella has been a kind of green missionary, criss-crossing North America, knocking on corporate and municipal doors, evangelizing for a new way of doing business that promises dual salvation: healthier profits and a cleaner environment. His gospel is a simple, six-page tract that extols the ISO 14001 environmental management system. Known by the acronym EMS, this process, done
properly, takes organizations beyond mere compliance with local, state and federal regulations. By following the never-ending cyclical path - Plan. . .Do. . .Check. . .Act -a company that tailors the EMS to its culture and its productivity should expect to continuously improve processes, reduce waste, increase profits and minimize the organization's environmental footprint.

Many organizations have resisted the EMS framework because its promise seems absurd: How could additional measures to improve the environment not cut into profits? Yet Kinsella insists EMS can deliver both profits and a healthy environment.

For years, Kinsella ran into a lot of skepticism. Now he finds companies embracing the idea.

"What I'm seeing now is a lot of people, a lot of companies, saying, 'We need to do this. Tell us how.' The time for the EMS is definitely here. Its era has arrived."

Look at Weyerhaeuser. In 1999, the timber and paper giant brought Kinsella on board to help it implement environmental management systems in each of its manufacturing facilities across North America.
Today, more than 200 of the company's pulp and paper mills, wood products facilities, box plants and other manufacturing units have created customized versions of an EMS, each at varying stages of development, implementation and certification. In addition, all the company's North American timberlands are EMS certified. What has this meant for this company of 45,000 employees?

"Just take water," says Ernesta Ballard, Weyerhaeuser's senior vice president for corporate affairs. "I mean, a pulp mill of old would use 35 million gallons a day. Now, it uses less than half that amount. The EMS has helped us exceed by many times what people 25 years ago thought was possible."

In the early 1990s, Weyerhaeuser paid annual fines and penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Post-EMS, that figure averages "well below" $100,000 a year. EMS systems in Weyerhaeuser's wood products mills have cut airborne emissions of volatile organic compounds by 44 percent since 1999, while water use per ton of production has dropped by nearly 38 percent and energy use has fallen 24 percent. Poisonous dioxins once released into wastewater from company mills have been reduced to nondetectable levels. The company expects the progress to continue. By 2020, it believes, reductions in its greenhouse gas emissions will be down 40 percent from 2000 levels, the equivalent of keeping 700,000 cars off the road. In 2005, company revenues totaled $22.6 billion, with net earnings of $733 million.

The company is profitable, its waste is decreasing, its use of hazardous chemicals is declining, and each year the organization's impact on the North American environment lessens - all from a leader in an industry long associated with abusing Mother Nature.

"You can document all of these things," Ballard says of Weyerhaeuser's accomplishments, "but what's hard to document is the 'lift.' And the lift, I think, is the most important benefit of the EMS." What does she mean by lift? "There are many levels of value to having an EMS, and the very first, to me, is confidence. If we create a culture of confidence -that environmental compliance is not only achievable, but is also good business -then that's the way we'll do business.

"The culture of confidence has raised the bar for the entire company," she explains. "If you're a big company, like ours, you want as many ideas as possible put into practice. The EMS helps us get that."

Because of the built-in flexibility of a sound EMS, it can work as effectively for small companies and government agencies as it does for major corporations. In the industrial underbelly of Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, Rudd Co. employs about 50 people who manufacture paints and other coatings. In 1997, management decided to implement an EMS. "We rewrote everybody's job description in the company," explains Laurel Jamison - "from mine as president and COO to the paint makers down on the floor. And part of each job description is the person's responsibility for environmental management."

As a regional paint manufacturer, Rudd competes with large national and global manufacturers. Jamison says the EMS helps Rudd stay competitive by eliminating waste and encouraging employees to find savings throughout the company. "It's truly a bottom-line issue," she says. "Environmental management saves money."

Adds Kalyn Burmeister, Rudd's regulatory manager, "Everybody here is in that mindset of constantly thinking about how we can do things better, how we can be in a constant state of improvement. The EMS has been very good for us. It's really encouraged the culture of pollution prevention."

In 1998, the U.S. Navy began studying environmental management systems for its Puget Sound operations, and by 2003 the Keyport facility had a certified ISO 14001 EMS. In 2005, the Port of Seattle installed a pilot EMS.

Sound Transit also bought a first-class ticket on the EMS railroad. "We're trying to save money and time on our projects," explains agency spokesman Bruce Gray. "It's a good way to cut out surprises on our construction projects. More than anything, it just helps us make sure we've got all the right boxes checked before we put out requests for proposals, let contracts and begin construction."

The ISO standard for environmental management systems grew out of a 1992 meeting in Rio de Janeiro, at which representatives of industry, government and academia, along with consultants like Kinsella, tackled the need for international coordination of efforts to reduce pollution. Kinsella was a member of ISO's Technical Committee 207, which fine-tuned the standard and, in 1996, unveiled ISO 14001.

"Regulators were initially skeptical," Kinsella says. He remembers making a presentation about ISO 14001 to a group that included staff from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "I had an inspector walk out on me. She started shouting, 'This isn't anything!' And she left the room." Like many of her colleagues at the time, she couldn't believe that an initiative designed by industry, and one that lacked the authority to impose fines on violators, would succeed in getting any business to clean up after itself.

Ten years later, he says, "EPA has come to recognize the EMS as an effective tool. An EMS doesn't say, 'You will reduce this contaminant by so many parts per million.' But it does say, 'You will be in compliance.' And that's significant. Because if you have a rigorous structure that will lead you to improvement, you will get improvement." Today, when EPA finds a company in significant violation of environmental regulations, it is not uncommon for the agency to reduce the monetary penalty if the offender implements an environmental management system. In fact, EPA has developed its own compliance-based EMS, similar to the ISO standard.

Typically, three things drive organizations to implement an EMS, according to Kinsella: