To determine the environmental impact reduction, the National Cleaner Production Center must perform the following activities:

1. Environmental Initial Review, in agreement with the procedures of the ISO 14001, in order to determine the environmental significant aspects of the company as a whole. This one is realized by the National Cleaner Production Center.
    
2. Then, the limits of the system must be defined for the project, and verify that the project contributes to improve at least one of the environmental significant aspects for the company as a whole. The objective is to support projects of investment that improve the environmental general performance of the company.
    
3. The National Cleaner Production Center establishes the main environmental indicators for the project (see list hereinafter), and it determines if there is foreseen that other indicators can be possible to affect negatively. In such a case, it will be necessary to check both, the principal indicator, and the complementary indicators, and a methodology has to be established to compensate positive and negative impacts.
    
4. Once the company legalizes the contracts and credit documents with the Financial Intermediary, and before initiating the implementation of the project, the National Cleaner Production Center will proceed to measure the selected indicators, as a base for the calculation of the environmental impact reduction. For such effect, the Center will be able to use third parties such as universities, environmental authorities labs, etc.
    
5. Once concluded the measurements before the implementation (ex-ante), the company will initiate the execution of the project, and the set up.
    
6. In the following 3 - 6 months after starting of the project (to guarantee the stability of the results), the measurements of the selected indicators will be executed again (measurement ex-post)
    
7. The comparison of the measurements ex-ante and ex-post of the main indicator, with privious analysis of the negative effects on other indicators, defines the percentage of reimbursement to grant (see section of reimbursements)

NOTE: Both environmental initial review and the measurements of the indicators object of the project, are exclusive responsibility of the National Cleaner Production Center. The costs associated with this activity can be included in the value of the credit.

The indicators to measure the environmental impact are separated in, those from global importance, and those of local importance.

Table 1: Environmental Indicators for Assessing an Investment Project

Indicators are basically measured as absolute emissions (mass emissions) per relevant unit of product (with exception of water pollution indicators where BOD/COD/TOC levels per output unit are measured). The concentration level, while eventually important for legal compliance is normally not used as indicator as the purpose of these investments is a reduced environmental impact.