“Waste and Environmental Management” Online Sustainability Course Review

After completing a ‘Waste and Environmental Management’ course on Udemy, I have learned a lot about what it’s like to be successful at being environmentally sustainable in all areas of work, especially in the business field. 

The course primarily focuses on environmental sustainability, which is built upon three main pillars: environmental protection, economic viability, and social equity. If a business fails to uphold any one of these pillars, it cannot be considered truly sustainable.

The course also stresses the importance of a business caring for sustainability because, in doing so, it will bring immense amounts of cost reduction, efficiency savings, and governance. I liked how the course mentions that the most significant reason a company should practice sustainability is that it will not only benefit the environment long term and generations to come, but is also a considerable cost reduction factor. 

The course expands deeply into how businesses can implement sustainability, such as instantiating numerous action plans, using submeters to measure energy usage on particular machines, and ensuring equipment isn’t running when the company isn’t in operation. 

I appreciated the course overviewing installing ‘submeters’ to different sectors of a business (particularly one in manufacturing) and giving a guide as to how to achieve a greater sense of sustainability, which included making a spreadsheet or other measuring tool to gather data over time to measure a particular component that uses energy. In addition to figuring out how to maximize energy, the course advises seeing when particular equipment can run after the company’s working hours. After knowing how much excess energy may be used unnecessarily, the company can advise its engineering team to construct and update respective machines to run more efficiently. 

This leads to the course advising a company installing a ‘capital project,’ where a company can even utilize rainfall to water toilets or anything around the environment surrounding the institution itself. Thus, this course stresses the importance of running multiple data gatherings and ensures that when running a factory, all equipment settings are optimized so they aren’t running unnecessarily. 

Finally, the course outlines the four different types of waste in the manufacturing industry where wastes: Hazardous(batteries, chemicals, oils), Non-Hazardous(plastic bottles, paper), Organic(food from kitchen/canteens), and Electrical wastes(printers, monitors, phones) are present. The course then stresses the importance of segregating waste because if a wasteful industry doesn’t do so, these four types of waste can mix in landfills and produce toxic components/gases that can eventually end up in our atmosphere. 

I was also fond of the course’s learning check quiz and assignment, which provided a ‘Canteen Waste Audit’ simulation with gathered data and a five-question multiple quiz that asked questions to the whole course as a whole, and I aced it. The audit assignment then asked you to write about what you learned from the audit and how you could implement new ways to reduce or improve opportunities in the canteen. In my opinion, the audit provided an opportunity to clearly track and categorize waste types and provide insight into the key areas where waste reduction is possible. I also thought the audit was straightforward, but simultaneously, it made up for revealing valuable improvement opportunities. 

In summary, this course provided a comprehensive understanding of environmental sustainability in business, emphasizing cost reduction, efficiency, and long-term benefits. I thought the most interesting aspect of the course was when it brought up the practice of utilizing ‘submeters’ to figure out when energy is used unnecessarily and the steps to take to fix such ways of implementing sustainability and leading to cost reduction. Overall, this was a firm course, and it has significantly reinforced my understanding of the critical role of sustainability in our lives and at work, as it will lead to business success and a greater sense of environmental responsibility. 

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