ISO 14001 IMPLEMENTATION AT A NATIONAL LABORATORY.

After a tumultuous year discovering serious lapses in environment, safety and health management at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Department of Energy established a new management contract. It called for implementation of an IS0 14001 Environmental Management System and registration of key facilities. Brookhaven Science Associates, the managing contractor for the Laboratory, designed and developed a three-year project to change culture and achieve the goals of the contract. The focus of its efforts were to use IS0 14001 to integrate environmental stewardship into all facets of the Laboratory's mission, and manage its programs in a manner that protected the ecosystem and public health. A large multidisciplinary National Laboratory with over 3,000 employees and 4,000 visiting scientists annually posed significant challenges for IS0 14001 implementation. Activities with environmental impacts varied from regulated industrial waste generation, to soil activation from particle accelerator operations, to radioactive groundwater contamination from research reactors. A project management approach was taken to ensure project completion on schedule and within budget. The major work units for the Environmental Management System Project were as follows: Institutional EMS Program Requirements, Communications, Training, Laboratory-wide Implementation, and Program Assessments. To minimize costs and incorporate lessons learned before full-scale deployment throughout the Laboratory, a pilot process was employed at three facilities. Brookhaven National Laboratory has completed its second year of the project in the summer of 2000, successfully registering nine facilities and self-declaring conformance in all remaining facilities. Project controls, including tracking and reporting progress against a model, have been critical to the successful implementation. Costs summaries are lower than initial estimates, but as expected legal requirements, training, and assessments are key cost centers. Successes to date include the pilot process, heightened employee awareness, registration of the first DOE National Laboratory facility, line ownership of the program, and senior management commitment