ISO 14001

A Missed Opportunity for Sustainable Global Industrial Development

Riva Krut, Harris Gleckman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134183777
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Business

ISO 14001 is the new international standard for environmental management systems. But what difference will it make to the environmental performance of companies that receive it? Will it do anything to further sustainable industrial development? This edition seeks to argue that it will not and further that it does not have a legitimate practice in discussions of sustainable industrial development.;The authors point to a massive democratic deficit in the process of establishing the standard in which small and medium-size enterprises, developing country officals, public opinion and environmental groups may have trouble participating. They aim to argue that this has put up barriers to the full participation of these parties. Moreover, they seek to describe how the standard reverses the trend for firms to innovate to meet the challenge of sustainability.

Chapter 1

Does ISO 14000 Series Reinforce
Intergovernmental Environmental Agreements
or Advance Trends in Sustainable Industrial
Development?

INTRODUCTION

As a management tool, environmental management systems are a rather new creation. In the 1980s, businesses began to figure out how to organise themselves in response to their ecological, public and legal obligations. By the 1990s, leading firms were continuing to develop and enlarge their environmental management systems. Several new issues became synonymous with leading global environmental policy and practice. International industry associations and many global firms made commitments in their environmental policies to sustainable development, the precautionary principle and community involvement. Many began to explore how to create and impose global corporate-wide environment and sustainable development standards while being sensistive to local ecosystems. Others started to produce public environmental reports. With the advent of the internet, firms are now beginning to post their environmental policies and reports on their web sites. The technology will soon exist for these to be updated in ‘real time’. Some firms are already committed to regular – six-monthly – updates, far more rapid than the once-every-one-or-two-years environmental reporting that we have seen in the past.

During this period, environmental managers discovered that sustainable development meant that they had to take into account labour conditions, employees’ health and safety, community relations, and other ‘soft’ social and cultural factors – as well as uncertain environmental science in relation to ecosystems or the global impact of industrial activity on the global climate. They found that simple focus on complying with existing laws and regulations could mean that they missed both the economic opportunities that came from investing in environmental technologies, as well as the dynamically changing public perception of respect for the environment. Firms that initiated environmental management systems in order to ensure compliance and reduce negative publicity discovered that savings and profits could be made from incorporating environmental management systems in early facility or product design. They also found that public expectations required them to learn about, and manage: climate change, persistent organic pollutants; land-based sources of marine pollution; and product take-back – to name only a few of the topics on the current corporate EMS agenda.

Other firms are exploring these issues in an eclectic range of strategic partnerships. Some have formed links with progressive non-governmental organizations that promote various environmental standards and approaches for integrating environment and industrial activity. The CERES principles, which stress public reporting and ecosystem responsibility, have been endorsed by major global firms such as General Motors, Polaroid, Sun Oil and HB Fuller. The Natural Step Principles, based on the assumption of environmental resource limits and closed-loop systems, have been endorsed by international companies such as Electrolux and Ikea. European Partners for Environment in Brussels brings together leading industrial partners with environmental NGOs and government officials to address complex issues on the sustainable industrial development agenda.

ISO 14001 is heralded by its proponents as industry’s answer to the challenge of sustainable development. Advertising copy in the Richard Clements Complete Guide to ISO 14000 is headlined: ISO 14000 is the hot new set of environmental management standards that add up to a global Green Stamp of Approval’.¹ The head of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) delegation to TC 207 presents ISO 14000 as an ‘instrument for sustainable development’ at various industry meetings around the world.² The front page of the ISO newsletter on ISO 14000 in March 1997 had a half-page photo of a tree in Bavaria, Germany, and is captioned: ‘Keeping our planet intact and preserving its pristine beauty while encouraging sustainable economic growth by judicious environmental management standards is the ultimate goal of ISO/TC 207.’³

The March 1997 edition of the Smithsonian has a full-page advertisement from the Japanese electronics firm NEC. In a stunning photograph of flowers and vegetables, NEC comments:

ISO 14001…environmental standards written in nature’s own hand. Nature always has a hand in writing the standards of our own existence, because nature is the standard of all life. Having long embraced measures that preserve and protect the environment, NEC enthusiastically supports the international environmental standards of the ISO 14000 series. These comprehensive guidelines bring a global focus to environmental management issues and allow organizations to compare their efforts against internationally accepted criteria. Written hand in hand with nature, ISO 14000 spells good news for the environment.⁴

Although ISO 14001 started out with a broad mandate, it ended up being written by a small group of business executives, hand in hand not with nature, but often with lawyers concerned about the legal obligations ISO 14001 may create in their home countries. Unfortunately, the ISO international environmental management systems standard was not founded on the best environmental management system in use by transnational corporations. It did not build upon the existing agreed intergovernmental understandings and conventions. This chapter will show that ISO 14001 makes no reference to the substance or process of any of these constructive developments. It will also show how concepts crucial to sustainable development, that were in the initial thinking and texts in ISO 14001, were watered down or completely diluted during the negotiation process. These include pollution prevention, the polluter pays principle, public participation, an initial environmental impact review, and performance reporting. Inferences that ISO 14001 can, on its own, bring sustainable industrial development are just that: an act of faith.

Proponents of the new environmental systems standard ISO 14001 make it sound like intergovernmental environmental standards, although it is not. It is the result of a private-sector voluntary initiative, but the differences are sometimes blurred by the media and general public. The NEC advertisement, for example, that speaks of ‘internationally accepted criteria’ is referring not to intergovernmental environmental criteria, but to business systems criteria. In contrast to this private-sector standard, intergovernmental environmental agreements have for some years been working to elevate the standard of international environmental performance. The result has been a set of agreements and standards that integrate sustainable development concepts – precisely those concepts that were removed from ISO 14001.

ISO 14001: REVERSING THE TREND TO SUSTAINABLE
INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT

While the EU negotiated EMAS and the British defined the first standards for environmental management systems, the ISO conducted their own discussions on the issue of environmental management. ISO recognized that the concepts of sustainable development and environmental protection had evolved to the extent that they were becoming part of legal and business practice. The ISO/IEC Strategic Advisory Group on Environment (SAGE) was established inter alia to ‘assess the needs for future international standardization work to promote worldwide application of the key elements embodied in the concept of sustainable industrial development (emphasis added)’.⁵

As part of its preparatory work, the ISO secretariat distributed a position paper defining sustainable development and environmental management guiding principles as:

2.1.2. The concept of sustainable development is now embraced by many government and business leaders. For business purposes, sustainable development means that operating activities should meet the needs of present stakeholders, (shareholders, employees, consumers and communities) without impairing the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

2.1.3. Environmental protection is an important element but only one element of sustainable development. With respect to the environment, the aim is to ensure that current use of environment and natural resources does not damage prospects for use by future generations.⁶

In their subsequent negotiations, the ISO could have built upon this definition of sustainable development as well as advances among some of the leading industry associations and individual businesses in implementing sustainable development. The standard that ISO adopted, however, is far more limited in scope and commitment. Most crucially, the initial interest in standards for environmental management, which was of significance to global firms and to the intergovernmental process for some years, began to focus on standards for environmental management systems. With this switch of language, the focus on performance improvement was replaced with a focus on process and systems improvement, with the inference that these could affect performance. The result is that the ISO international environmental management system standard omits any explicit link between environmental management and sustainable development.

SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND VOLUNTARY
INTERNATIONAL CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS

Over the last 15 years, several industry and corporate initiatives have defined a range of responses to the challenge of environmental management and sustainable development. These have been characterized by strong agreement on the principle of sustainable development, but equally strong debate about its meaning. New terminology emerged from this debate, such as ‘economically and environmentally sustainable development’, ‘sustainable industrial development’ and ‘sustainable management system’.⁷ Advocates of these views stress the compatibility of economic and environmental investments and state that environmental protection makes good business sense. In practice, advocates clearly feel that there are financial costs to better environmental management. This support for sustainable development is usually accompanied by appeals to regulators to provide incentives for environmentally sound practices that go ‘beyond compliance’, thereby reducing cost or risk for environmental innovators and leaders.⁸

INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONS

In the absence of a strong national or international regulatory framework, many industry associations have established voluntary guidelines or standards of practice (see Box 1.1). The International Chamber of Commerce produced its first environmental statement in 1965, and in preparation for the Rio Earth Summit later issued a Business Charter on Sustainable Development. As a result of the industrial disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1985, the Canadian Chemical Producer’s Association launched the Responsible Care® initiative, which was subsequently adopted by the European Chemical Industry Council, the US Chemical Manufacturers Association and several other national chemical industry associations around the world. In 1989, an oil tanker accident in Alaska, the Exxon Valdez, resulted in the Valdez Principles, an environmental code of conduct defined by public interest groups and stressing public reporting. It was subsequently renamed the CERES Principles, after the drafting group: the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies and Societies.

Industry associations generally try to develop positions on the environment that are acceptable to a majority of its members. Their policy statements represent attempts to soften potentially difficult topics for individual members and to reassure a sometimes skeptical global or local community that there are environmentally responsible firms within the industry. One might expect these statements to be environmentally weak; however, the past decade has seen a proliferation of environmental statements from trade associations that integrate a new language of corporate environmental management. These cover topics as diverse as contract terms for the transfer of potentially hazardous chemical technologies, to the conditions for sustainable tourism. For example, the July 1996 ‘Keidanren Appeal on Environment’ calls for the voluntary action of Japanese industry, directed at conserving the global environment by reconfirming environmental ethics, realizing eco-efficiency and tightening voluntary efforts.

Box 1.1 SELECTED INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION ENVIRONMENTAL GUIDELINES WITH INTERNATIONAL APPLICATION

Alliance Internationale de Tourism/ Federation Internationale de l’Automobile – ATI/FTA (1992): Charter of Ethics for Tourism and the Environment

Group of Intern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Boxes
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Does ISO 14000 Series Reinforce Intergovernmental Environmental Agreements or Advance Trends in Sustainable Industrial Development?
• 2 Does the Process Within the ISO Represent the Perspectives of the Major Environmental Stakeholders?
• 3 Does the New GATT Agreement Change the Status of ISO Standards?
• 4 What Are the Economic Consequences of ISO 14001?
• 5 How Can ISO 14000 Be Integrated into Public Law and Policy?
• 6 Can Something Be Done to Regain the Initiative for Global Sustainable Industrial Development?
• Annex A Developing Country Organizations Contacted
• Annex B The ISO 14001 Series
• Annex C Composition of TC 207: Voting and Participation by Developing Countries
• Annex D Agenda 21 Principles for Multinational Corporations
• Annex E Selected Corporate Statements Supporting Global Environmental Management
• Notes
• Index