The ISO 14001:2015 Companion

A Straightforward Guide to Implementing an EMS in a Small Business

Garry Cornell

• Publisher: Advisera Expert Solutions Ltd
• ISBN:
  9789538155161
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Garry Cornell has more than 25 years' experience working in Environmental Management as a senior manager, consultant, and certification auditor. He has worked with businesses internationally, in a range of different industries, helping them to implement and improve their environmental management standards.

This book aims to give you an explanation of what is typically required by the ISO 14001 standard, taking technical terminology and "Standard Speak" and interpreting it into something understandable.

Although this book is written primarily for people who are new to environmental management, or new to implementing ISO 14001, it can be used by a much wider audience.

The book was written for those of you who will take responsibility for driving the development of environmental management in your business. This book can also be used if you are an auditor, especially an internal auditor, to understand more about what you should expect to find in a good EMS. It provides advice on how to conduct internal audits, but you can also refer to different sections to understand what the clauses of the standard really expect from the business. If you are a CEO or CTO, this book will help you to understand what sort of commitment is required to implement ISO 14001. It will also show you how to turn that initial thought into reality within your business, including the costs and benefits you will likely see in return.

This book is also useful to those who have more experience in environmental management, because the changes in the ISO 14001:2015 version are explained throughout this book. In addition to containing a section dedicated to understanding the changes, the book was written to reflect what the new standard requires and how to implement those changes. Consultants can also gain knowledge from the explanation of the changes in the ISO 14001:2015 standard and, because the book not only explains what should happen, it also provides ideas and techniques for how to make those things happen. This will help you guide your clients through some of the human issues they might encounter when trying to drive change, in addition to the technicalities. Although the book guides you through the certification process, you can use this book whether or not you are planning certification. Maybe you just want to benefit from better environmental management, and from implementing a really good EMS.

1. INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces you to environmental management ideas, and the use of ISO 14001. It explains how you can use this book to help you implement an EMS in your business.

1.1 Why environmental management? Why ISO 14001?

For the last 20 to 30 years, environmental management within businesses has grown as a discipline. It is no longer just environmental pressure groups who care about the environment; it has become a mainstream political issue and a topic that most people have an opinion about.

Although climate change is the topic that springs to most people’s minds when thinking about environmental issues, it’s not the only issue. Others include loss of areas such as tropical rainforests and coral reefs, desertification (desert areas growing rapidly), lack of clean water, air pollution, use of limited natural resources, and pollution of water and land. In addition, there are local environmental issues that affect us every day, such as pollution from industry, waste, traffic, noise, dust, and other nuisances.

Billions of dollars’ worth of research by universities and other institutes has expanded our knowledge of how people can impact the environment. We know so much more now than we did, say, 10 years ago. And, it seems like the more we understand, the more we have to worry about!

This research leads to generally accepted theories, which become mainstream knowledge in society, institutions, and pressure groups like Greenpeace. Pressure is then exerted on governments to enact legislation or regulations to control or manage environmental impacts.

Businesses are therefore hit by both regulatory requirements from governments, and social pressures. These pressures are felt either directly through sales, or indirectly through shareholder requirements or other customer demands.

The reality is that for businesses to operate today, your personal views on whether climate change is happening or not are as irrelevant as whether you think businesses should pay taxes or not.

Environmental management is now a requirement for most businesses, whether you like it or not.

The good news is that in most cases, a good Environmental Management System will contribute to your business. Not just because it means you will win the contract with the customer who requires ISO 14001 certification, but also because good environmental management is about working smarter, wasting less, using less, and reducing costs.

ISO 14001 is an international standard that was developed not only to provide a standard against which different businesses can demonstrate their environmental credentials, but also to provide all types of businesses with a model and framework to follow to help them manage environmental issues.

The ISO 14001 standard provides a very useful and comprehensive guide on how to understand what environmental issues matter to your business, how to go about reducing the likelihood of being exposed to any possible environmental problems, and how to gain the most benefit to your business from environmental management. It will work together with other management systems, and while allowing you to focus on the important environmental issues.

The other benefits to your business come through what your own people think about working for you. There is evidence that businesses with a good environmental reputation will find it easier to recruit new staff, particularly younger staff. Many businesses have successfully used environmental issues to engage with staff in a way that they never could before with such uninspiring topics as quality or financial controls.

So, ISO 14001 and environmental management doesn’t need to be just another bureaucratic pile of paperwork. It can be something that really helps the business, in both the short term and the long term. Done the right way, it can change a business’ future for the better, and hopefully help the rest of our futures, too.

1.2 Basic environmental management principles

Environmental management is not too difficult to understand if you can get past all the jargon and terminology. The environment itself is often broken down into three “media”:

• Land – the soil. Impacts include land contamination from chemicals.
• Air – the atmosphere. Impacts include CO2 emissions, dust emissions, solvent emissions, etc.
• Water – rivers, groundwater and aquifers, lakes, streams, seas, oceans. Impacts include the use of water, and the pollution of water.

When we think about environmental impacts, we think about how these three media are affected by our business activities and processes.

These three media, in turn, support habitats. Habitats are the different types of places that plants and animals live, for example grasslands, rivers, forests, coral reefs, and rainforests. A habitat is also where people live: a house, street, or town.

When we think about environmental impacts, we also think about how these habitats are affected.

Later, in section 8.5, we will look at the model called “Source-Pathway-Receptor,” which describes three parts to how an environmental impact can occur. You don’t need to be able to understand the science behind how this happens to achieve good environmental management. You just need to be able to understand that impacts can occur whenever something is taken from the environment or put into the environment.

It’s important to remember that every business will have some sort of impact on the environment, even if it is just having the lights turned on, or electricity to power a laptop.

Applying environmental management to your business is not about comparing yourself to other industries and saying, “Look at how bad they are,” and being satisfied that there is nothing you need to do. The point of environmental management is to improve what you do and to reduce your environmental impacts, no matter how insignificant you think they might be compared to those of bigger industries.

There are two different types of environmental impacts that your business can have:,

• Direct – your business activities directly cause the impact, for example the release of emissions from a chimney, spillage of chemicals into a river, etc.
• Indirect – it’s because of your business that the impacts occur, but you don’t do it yourself, for example CO2 emissions from electricity generation. You use the electricity, but the electricity company releases the CO2.

One key principle of good environmental management is to understand what you are responsible for. There are three levels of responsibility, and each require a different response:

• Control – this is where you or your business have direct control over what happens, and you can make decisions that will change what happens. For example, you can control what your staff do, or what your contractors do.
• Influence – this is where your business can exert some influence over what happens, and can try to make change happen somewhere else. For example, you can influence what your suppliers do, or what your customers do.
• Prepare – this is where your business has no control or influence at all, but would need to prepare for or respond to an incident to prevent it from causing an environmental impact. An example might be illegal dumping of waste on your site, where you have no control to prevent it from happening, but will need to deal with the consequences. Another example might be how you prepare to respond to changes in the climate, such as flooding.

It is more common for you to have control over your direct impacts, although you can have control over indirect impacts as well. In the example of using electricity, you can control your electricity use, although the impact is indirect.

Good environmental management principles say that you control what you can, influence what you can, and prepare for what you can’t control or influence.

1.3 Purpose of ISO 14001

There is a section of the ISO 14001 standard that is not very often read. It’s the “Introduction” section, and the reason it’s not read very much is because it doesn’t contain any requirements for the business. It has no clauses to follow or obligations to comply with.

It does, however, set out the aims of an Environmental Management System, and it’s well worth looking at.

During my work with many different businesses I have found that a good way to explain the purpose of ISO 14001 is that it aims to ensure that your business:

• is not caught out by any legal requirement or anything else you said you would do
• benefits from reducing its impact on the environment (including short- and long-term financial benefits)
• reduces its risks due to poor environmental management
  

These are the three key aims of your Environmental Management System and, ultimately, of the ISO 14001 standard. All the other clauses of the standard are the mechanisms by which you achieve these three things.

However, ISO 14001 isn’t a list of environmental standards that your business has to achieve. People often make the mistake of thinking that ISO 14001 isn’t for them because they won’t be able to do everything it requires. In reality, the standard does not mandate things like: “You must recycle all your waste,” or “You must reduce your electricity use,” or “You must not use hazardous chemicals.” Instead, it’s a framework that you can apply to any business, and use it to decide what you want to improve, with a greater understanding of the benefits to your business.

The benefit of ISO 14001 is that it can be used by any business, as opposed to certificates like Eco-labels or standards like FSC, which only apply to certain businesses. It is also written in a way that you are in control of the scale and pace of the improvements you make. It sets out a very logical way to understand more about the business and environmental issues, covering a range of potential issues and helping you to determine the risks and opportunities. It’s then up to the business to decide how it responds to these risks and opportunities.

The other great advantage to using ISO 14001 is that it is designed to integrate into other business processes. So, if you have a Quality Management System based on ISO 9001, there will be many common requirements. You don’t...