5 Minute Guide to ISO 14001

First of all, let me explain a little about the requirements of ISO 14001:2004.

It helps if you understand the basis of the standard. In the same way that ISO9001 is entirely concerned with meeting customer requirements, ISO14001 is entirely concerned with meeting environmentally-related requirements. In particular, requirements relating to prevention and control of pollution. 

So, in the UK, the mother of such legislation is the Control of Pollution Act. From this, many hundreds of regulations, powers and associated acts have arisen. All organizations are required (by law, not just by ISO14001) to be aware of the relevant legislation and to comply with the requirements. ISO14001 merely provides the structure to do this in a systematic way.

In addition, ISO14001 requires that your organization considers the significant impacts that its activities may have on the environment. Where it is possible, feasible and economic to make a meaningful improvement to those activities, your organization should set itself targets for improvement with associated plans.

At the top level, ISO14001 requires that you:

• State your policy for your environmental management system (which must include a commitment to prevent pollution and to continually improve your environmental management system)

• Identify all laws, regulations, codes of practice and other requirements which are environmentally related

• Monitor your level of compliance with the requirements

• Identify the aspects of your business which have a significant impact on the environment and those that it can control or influence

• Identify targets including commitments to avoid pollution and to improve (i.e. reduce) its environmental impact

In support of this, the standard requires that you

• have sufficient resources to meet the above requirements, including suitably trained people.

• Define and communicate the roles, responsibilities and authorities of people involved in the system

• Have suitable communication systems within your organization

• have procedures for control of documents & records (identical to ISO9000 requirements)
• identify operations that are "associated with identified significant environmental aspects", and that you control them appropriately
• plan for emergency situations (e.g. where an accident results in an event which would cause pollution, etc)

You are required to evaluate your compliance with your own targets, and with legal and other requirements, and to use that information to improve your systems.

Internal audits must be conducted (e.g. by experts such as us, (hint!) and the results of those audits should be acted on as appropriate. 

There are many other actions that the standard requires, but there is no requirement for these to controlled by procedures (unless you decide that it would be useful to have an instruction that describes the activities), nor that any records need be kept of the actions being conducted. So long as the actions are conducted and you can explain how you conduct them, the requirements of ISO 14001:2004 are being achieved.

As an overview, the standard requires that you 

• identify how your business adversely affects the environment and also which laws are relevant to the operations of the business.

• plan how you control your processes so as to minimise the environmental impact.

• monitor the effectiveness of the system at meeting legal and other requirements as well as your own targets.

• analyse the results and use them to continually improve your systems.

OK! The five minutes are up.

Thank you for your time, and I hope that this document has been of some use to you.

Email click here