Achieving and maintaining compliance with California’s air quality regulations can mean the difference between success and failure within your business.
But understanding and complying with air quality regulations can be tricky
If you succeed in the endeavor, you’ll reduce risk and decrease the chances of having problems and violations.
If you fail, however, the opposite will occur.
Today’s business are faced with more air quality regulations than ever before, and the number of regulations that are passed increase with complexity each year.
What’s more is that most people don’t initially realize how invasive air quality regulations can be to their business.
The rules and regulations of the various air quality agencies in California can:
- Impose conditions that can limit the production of your facility.
- Develop regulations that can require you to purchase new equipment to retrofit existing equipment to meet air emission limits.
- Amend regulations that require more testing, recordkeeping, reports, etc.
- Limit the types of products that your company can sell.
In addition, many of the rules are comprised of pages and pages of words that can be misinterpreted or missed altogether.
The rules are filled with “grey areas” that are hidden like landmines on a battlefield
Do you have a strategy to take on dealing with that big of a challenge?
In our experience, successfully managing air quality compliance requires you to understand several strategies, three of which we’ve listed to give you a helpful start:
1. Manage the “grey areas” that exist in the air quality rules and regulations.
Air quality rules and regulations are black and white—in that you’ll know exactly what you can and can’t do in order to comply with each rule—but therein lies the problem. Complying with the rules in practice is more of an exercise of managing the grey area, and that’s an art in and of itself.
2. Keep an eye (or ear) out for new regulations or changes to existing ones.
The rules and regulations have the ability to significantly change the way you do business, which is why you need to know them. The development or amendment of the rules is a public process in which you should participate so that the rules don’t end up adversely affecting you. Be careful, though. Tracking new or proposed rules can be like tracking a moving target; it can be a time suck from your already busy schedule.
3. Work with the folks in your facility to ensure that the requirements of the rules are followed.
The job of the front line staff is to keep the operation running smoothly, not to get bogged down in the details of a specific rule or regulation.
In most cases, however, the highest risk for non-compliance lies with the front line staff since don’t they know all of the regulations like you do.
Having a successful air quality compliance program requires you to work with the front line staff members so that they know what they can and can’t do. At the same time, you don’t want to give them a dissertation for every rule.
Putting all of this into action can be difficult
We know that putting all of this into practice can be difficult and because of what’s at stake, it’s easy to fall into “analysis-paralysis” and get nothing done.
If there is one thing we’ve learned by working with manufacturing facilities it’s this: Your facility is always in operation, and you don’t have time to figure out what to make of the regulatory requirements.
That’s why we’re here.
We want to help you make the best decisions possible and understand what is needed to comply with the air quality rules and regulations
And to show you we mean business, we’ve created a list of resources that you can use right now.
The Most Important Thing we Learned by Helping our Clients Comply with SCAQMD Rules 1146 or 1146.1
Don’t Buy a Cogeneration Engine in Southern California Until You Read This
What Jeff Foxworthy Can Teach Us About Odors and SCAQMD Compliance
4 Ways To Maintain Compliance During a Breakdown Event: Understanding SCAQMD Rule 430
The SCAQMD Annual Emission Reporting (AER) Program
The material has been hand-selected from our content library though we know it’s not all-encompassing.
If you need something more specialized, we may be able to assist you
Envera Consulting focuses on partnering with clients in order to navigate them through the maze of California’s air quality regulations so that they can achieve and maintain compliance.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we can do the same work for you, please contact us.
We’d be more than happy to help.
If we can’t help you, we’ll gladly make a recommendation for someone who can.
If you have no interest in working with us, please enjoy the content library that we’ve assembled for you, in which we share our knowledge and expertise to help you understand air quality rules and regulations and how to stay in compliance.
We’ve invested significant time and resources to build it, and we’re giving it to you with our compliments.
We’re proud of our content library, and we believe that it’s the first of its kind for air quality consulting firms in California.
Thank you for stopping by.
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