Business Objective

A manufacturer in California with over 20 separate locations throughout the State sought assistance in the completion of the required storm water Annual Report under the California Storm Water Industrial General Permit (General Permit). Corporate environmental compliance staff identified a variety of inconsistencies among these annual reports, and also sought practical compliance solutions that could reduce the burden of ongoing monitoring and streamline work flows for facility staff.

Technical Approach

ALG was selected by the manufacturing company for our technical expertise and demonstrated success in securing compliance with effluent limits established in the General Permit. ALG applied a systematic review of prior annual reports among all of the client’s operations, which included a trend analysis of all effluent testing/data. This practical tool allowed ALG to identify program improvements developed at single site that could be used company wide. In addition, ALG analyzed storm water compliance workflow among different sites and recommended improvements to streamline ongoing compliance tasks among all facilities. This was successful in part because local facility compliance staff could share the benefits that were realized by simplifying specific compliance tasks. Benchmarking performance was then communicated through corporate management, allowing facility staff to learn from each other on how to improve their management of the reporting process.

Results

By leveraging our practical experience in compliance with the state’s General Permit, combined with our detailed analysis of storm water effluent data, ALG was able to identify specific Best Management Practices that could be implemented to achieve compliance with numeric limits. In additional ALG offered improved workflows to streamline annual reporting task. This comprehensive review allowed several sites to not only certify their annual reports with confidence but also certify sample frequency reduction to reduce monitoring in the following reporting year resulting in additional savings.