Updated March 2025
When the public thinks of environmental compliance and greenhouse gases, they typically picture large businesses and massive factories. But if you work in the manufacturing industry, you know it’s not about how big your building or brand is but the qualities and quantities of the materials you store and process on-site. In fact, you could be considered a small business and still meet the thresholds for federal/state reporting programs like Toxic Release Inventory or Tier II.
Air emissions reporting is a requirement for large and small facilities. Under EPCRA Section 312, the EPA requires facilities to report their emissions and chemical inventory in their TRI and Tier II reports. Tier II reports are submitted annually to help state and local emergency planners and responders know what chemicals are on-site at a facility. TRI reports calculate the amount of emissions (air, water, and waste) a facility emits each year.
The fact is that small-sized facilities are just as responsible for complying with air emission standards and chemical inventory reporting just like their big business counterparts. Of course, there are unique challenges for small businesses and air emissions management, specifically in terms of time and resource availability.
How exactly can a smaller business keep up with its air emissions management obligations? We suggest you take a few pointers from the big businesses that spend years refining and optimizing their compliance processes. We’re sharing six lessons that big companies get right when it comes to air compliance and a few tips that we can learn from small businesses.
- Small businesses face unique challenges when it comes to having the time and resources to dedicate to robust air emissions management. So, how can small manufacturers keep up with the crowd?
- Surprisingly, small businesses can learn much about air emissions management by looking to the big guys.
Accuracy is the Heart of Compliance
A report is only as good as the data it contains. It’s not enough to simply submit a report. You need to do thorough QA/QC on your data. A big business can have one person writing the report and another reviewing it before submission to catch inconsistencies. A small business might not have the human resources to do that, so you need to go to the source of accuracy – the base chemical records and calculations you use to generate your reports.
To get the most accurate data, large facilities often rely on software to properly calculate emissions and manage all chemical data needed for reports. Small businesses are no exception and should depend on accurate calculations simplified with software rather than Excel sheets. Hard to calculate emissions from combustion equipment, kilns, particulate matter (PM), and control devices can make calculation increasingly complex. Small and large businesses should trust their emissions calculations with software designed with accuracy and compliance in mind.
Think Lean
Regardless of your business size, lean is the EH&S methodology of choice. This means the solution to your air emissions management woes isn’t necessarily to get bigger or hire more people but to find a small team that’s highly talented and has the right tools in place. Even the biggest businesses with the most air emissions to report are constantly trying to find ways to do things smarter, not larger.
For small businesses this could mean spending more time training your existing staff on EPA regulations or reviewing your chemical inventory more often throughout the year to let your small team prepare more effectively throughout the year.
Investing in Air Emissions Management is Good Business
Big businesses invest money into their EH&S departments – even if they downsize the staff size, they invest time and money to develop new protocols and programs to make things run more smoothly. That’s because they know the return on investment goes far beyond simple environmental compliance.
First and foremost, environmental management is about knowing what processes occur in your facility and how to improve them. As an additional bonus, air emissions management keeps you from paying noncompliance fines and is a great way to cash in on the PR potential of being green.
Have a System in Place
Big manufacturers don’t leave their air emissions management to chance. Instead, most are making the move to some form of online EH&S management systems. This protects them from pitfalls such as staff absence & turnover and means they can access their environmental data from almost anywhere.
As environmental compliance gets more complex (and the rules keep changing), having your EH&S team stuck using spreadsheet software becomes a more problematic solution. Developing your own in-house solution can present excessive costs, making going with an established software provider the better decision financially. And although consultants might be a good way to patch holes in your current air emissions management, they don’t give you a long-term return on investment.
Communication is Key
If there’s one thing big business gets right, it’s knowing that information is power. CEOs now expect to be kept in the loop of the latest efforts of their EH&S teams. In turn, they are sure to communicate those efforts to their stakeholders.
Environmental management is the litmus test of how well 2/3rds of your business is running (People, Planet, Profit), and that’s information that should be shared with everyone in your small business.
Get Every Facility on the Same Page
If your business is large enough to have more than one site, it is enormously beneficial to get them all on the same page. This also applies if you have multiple processes for which you keep separate data silos. This includes standardizing how they do air emissions reporting and making sure that people aren’t doing redundant work. Time is money when it comes to your EH&S department, and you can’t afford to waste it doing the same job twice. Another way to get your facilities on the same page is to create a shared air emission and MSDS database on your own intranet or use a secure document-sharing service.
However, there are also some important lessons that larger organizations can learn from small businesses. The differences in scale lead to different opportunities, challenges, and points of view. These tactics are essential for the survival of any small business and can benefit larger companies as well.
Small businesses try to avoid penalties with compliance
Small businesses truly know that a penny saved is a penny earned. That’s why you’ll never find a successful small business that just assumes it will be paying environmental fines. Instead, they invest in ways to avoid paying penalties since they know it has a better long-term return. Small businesses would be shocked to learn that some large companies simply budget for huge losses every year because they undervalue environmental compliance.
Unfortunately, environmental fines are not something you can (or should) just patch over with money. We view paying environmental fines as a tell-tale sign of inefficient, poorly managed processes, poor choice of materials, or even insufficient training. So, if you’re seeing fines, it’s a symptom of a larger problem and an opportunity to improve efficiency.
Seeing fines as a built-in cost of being in business is overlooking the non-monetary downsides that can cause serious harm to your business, such as:
- You could lose your position as a preferred supplier in your supply chain
- Noncompliance undoes your best marketing efforts and can cause PR issues
- The talent market for recruiting workers now prefers greener workplaces over those with known air emissions violations.
We’ve seen firsthand some profitable companies refusing to buy from suppliers that have a record of noncompliance. Some are even requiring their vendors to go green or go home.
ERA’s Environmental Management System is the leader in accurate air, water, and waste reporting and compliance management. This simple, unified platform gives you total insight into your environmental performance and reduces your EH&S overhead by over 80%. ERA Environmental provides trusted and expertly designed EHS software, helping you achieve total regulatory compliance and implement sustainability strategies.
- Reduce overhead from your air, water, and waste management tasks by over 80% for drastic cost reductions.
- Automate your environmental management - reporting, KPI roll-up, data analysis, imports, and supply chain data can all be handled by advanced automated logic.
- Our centralized platform provides superior, secure data management, and the most accurate air emissions possible, speciated down to the smallest detail.
Small businesses empower their EH&S specialist with effective tools
In the world of environmental data management, it can be tempting to assume that bigger is better. More spreadsheets, more EH&S managers, more reports... but the reality is the success of an EH&S department isn’t measured by how large it is, but by how effectively things get done. That’s why small businesses are 100% capable of getting ISO 14001 certified and can have a perfect compliance record, just like some big players.
The key is to be better, not bigger. Having fewer resources forces small businesses to think leaner and smarter. They know that a highly skilled EH&S specialist equipped with the right tools is better than a huge EH&S department vulnerable to communication and redundancy issues.
ERA's software is the most powerful environmental tracking tool available, giving you the functionality to track emissions from any process or equipment. Advanced facility modeling and customization lets you define your exact parameters for accurate reporting.
Built-in functionality for any type of source, including the most complex setups with control devices and Continuous Monitoring Systems. VOCs, HAPs, VHAPS, GHGs, NOx, SOx, PM, and other criteria pollutants.
That includes accurate calculations adapted directly from verified industry sources and regulators. ERA’s Master Chemical List contains comprehensive records tracking regulatory requirements for all of your chemicals.
Small businesses know their regulatory obligations
For small businesses, being in environmental compliance can literally be a case of life or death. This sink-or-swim attitude means that small businesses are less likely to get complacent about reporting deadlines or obeying permit conditions. Too often, we see large businesses in difficult compliance situations that give up when faced with dozens of permits and reports.
Cross your fingers and hope the EPA doesn’t notice or - worse - convince yourself you qualify for an exemption and plead ignorance to the regulatory reality. Some even just stop trying to meet certain conditions and absorb the resulting fines because the cost of the fines seems to be less burdensome than staying compliant.
This is a losing strategy. Ignoring compliance requirements can send you spiraling downwards into a situation that just compounds your penalties when you eventually get audited. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the best things a big business can emulate from small companies is their attitude about compliance. Big business needs to tap into the same concerns that motivate the little guys.
Implement a Trusted Air Management Solution
You can put all of these tips into action with help from ERA’s Air Emissions Management Software. This comprehensive solution can streamline your emissions data management by 80%, provide accurate forecasting to guide your organization’s growth, and complete integration with your continuous monitoring system.
With ERA, you unlock a full suite of process tracking tools for any type of emissions and any process or equipment. Built-in reports simplify all of your emissions reporting tasks, with direct upload for many federal and state programs. Let’s talk about how ERA can meet your organization’s unique emissions management needs. Schedule a discovery call with one of our project analysts today.
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