To determine the environmental impact reduction, the Vietnam Cleaner Production Centre (VNCPC) must perform the following activities:

1. Environmental Initial Review, in agreement with the ISO 14001 procedures, in order to determine the environmental significant aspects of the company as a whole. This one is realized by VNCPC.
    
2. Then, the limits of the system must be defined for the project, and VNCPC must 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 investment projects that improve the general environmental performance of the company.
    
3. VNCPC establishes the main environmental indicators for the project (see list hereinafter), and it determines if other indicators can possibly be negatively affected. 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 weight positive and negative impacts and evaluate the balance.
    
4. Once the company legalizes the contracts and credit documents with the Financial Intermediary, and before initiating the implementation of the project, VNCPC will proceed to measure the selected indicators, as a base for the calculation of the environmental impact reduction. For such effect, the Centre may use third parties such as universities, environmental authorities labs, etc.
    
5. Once the measurements before the implementation (ex-ante) have been carried out, the company will initiate the execution of the project, and the set up.
    
6. In the 3 - 6 months after startup 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 previous analysis of the negative effects on other indicators, defines the percentage of reimbursement to be granted (see Reimbursements section).

NOTE: Both the detailed environmental review and the measurements of the project indicators are exclusive responsibilities of VNCPC. 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 of 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 an absolute reduction of the environmental impact.