scope:

Objective The aim of this VDI guideline is to provide a roadmap and support in the design of effective measures in environmental protection and environmental management.

Due to this guidance, technical processes are the focus of this examination, in particular. Improvement of these processes should be carried out in consideration of the concept of sustainability. The procedure is project-oriented.

On the one hand, it meets the requirement to support decisions as well as to satisfy the increasing necessity of working out solutions, not only for individual plants, also beyond company boundaries. On the other hand, it finds its justification in the increased complexity and lack of transparency of operational decisions. Exemplarily, it's referred to the external, consequential effects which occur even, for instance, in connection with a circulatory management concept, or, to take another example, the technical-economic interdependencies between feedstocks, production procedures, product quality and environmental quality.

This guideline is also positioned against the background of the operational management task of evaluating the connections and interrelations of "environment" as an asset used in industrial operations - whether in its function as a supplier of resources or as a "receiving basin" for emissions in the fields of waste, wastewater, soil, noise and air. Referring to this, the guideline also provides quantitative tools to help rational decision-making in addition. Assuming a holistic approach, thinking in terms of the interrelationships between effects makes it possible to find feasible and operational solutions in the operational field. A conformable approach

• has a practical and explanatory orientation,

• conveys a general philosophy, specific methods and techniques, and also permits their theoretical assignment to problem categories or procedural steps, and

• integrates questions of system design (that means the problems and their elimination are accounted) as well as organisational questions into settlement of the project.

By presenting a clearly laid out procedure (procedure model) and exemplary instruments, support is provided in the design and control of environmentally relevant processes in the operational area. To this end, a tried and tested procedure familiar from systems engineering is transferred into the environmental field in consideration and combination of different disciplinal approaches [5; 8]. Already available intruments and software tools for structuring, drafting and designing environmentally relevant processes can be assigned to this procedure model.

For exemplary application of the procedure model, continuation sheets will be developed. On the one hand, these continuation sheets include examples for sectors of industry and/or companies. On the other hand, the sheets present an in-depth explanation of the individual procedural steps which are founded by systems engineering.