Environmental Audits
There are two aspects to the audit. The first deals with physical audit procedures. What is being audited? Who are the audit team? Who will the team talk to? When will the audit take place? The second is the audit itself, matching of the situation to the set of environmental laws, recording, and reporting the results of observations.
Your book gives you about as much of this second aspect as can be fit into 11 pages. When I teach this subject in the classroom, I drag in the Corps of Engineers "Environmental Assessment and Management Guide (EC 95-05), a 3.5 inch thick binder with six or seven hundred pages of checklists. Without such a checklist as a starting place, it would be impossible to go through the thousands of pages of environmental regulations and translate them into a set of questions pertinent to sites. The binder is not complete, and the conclusion of almost every subsection suggests you check with the applicable state laws. Some sections likewise counsel you to check with local ordinances.
As with so many human endeavors, the keys to good environmental audits are proper planning at the front end and good human relations during the process. Planning can indicate what needs to be looked at and can cut those 700 pages of check lists down to a few hundred specific questions or procedures that need actually be addressed. Human relations can gain auditors access to information that is otherwise barred. Even experienced auditors with strong technical backgrounds can easily "get lost" in a facility. It is easy to overlook the obvious. Once plant employees trust the auditor, they will often point problems out. Trust involves the employees becoming convinced that the auditors are not "out to get somebody" but that the audit report can be the springboard to management attention and perhaps increased budget to take care of environmental problems.
Most U.S. Corporations do not have an incentive to put actual environmental audits on the web. A good audit will always have at least some negative findings, and no business wants to put negative material on the web. So the only real audits I've found were for governmental entities. There are lots of sites about "environment audits," but not about the type of compliance audit we are discussing here. Here is a report from an international environmental audit in Bangladesh for the LAFAEGE SURMA CEMENT company. (The original link does not work, but you can get it here.) As is common in international environmental audits required by the international lending agencies, such as the World Bank, the audit covers broader topics, including worker health, that would be separate in a US report. There are two parts to this project, read the Executive Summary and Introduction and note there are two parts to the report. Also the plants have not started operations yet. Nonetheless I think you will find it interesting. Skim the rest of the document and read what you find interesting. Bookmark it for the quiz.
On the other side of the world, New York State requires an audit by the state's environmental agency of all the other state agencies and departments. Here is a start page with some background.. Look at the background, then pull down the 2009-2010 Environmental Audit Report - Full report (518K, 151 pages) skim that document and also glance at the index. You'll note that the audit is really just a summary of known and reported violations. That's about all they could do. Save the pdf document for the quiz.