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ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems (EMS)
Put environmental management at the heart of your operations to achieve sustainable success. This international standard helps you reduce your environmental impact as well as grow your business. Read on to discover the benefits of, and requirements needed, for ISO 14001 implementation and certification.
What is ISO 14001 and Environmental Management?
ISO 14001 is an internationally accepted standard that outlines how to put an effective environmental management system in place in your organization. It is designed to help businesses remain commercially successful without overlooking environmental responsibilities and impacts. It can also help you to grow sustainably while reducing the environmental impact of this growth.
ISO 14001 belongs to the ISO 14000 family of environmental management standards (including ISO 14004), and provides the framework to allow you to meet increasingly high customer expectations of corporate responsibility, as well as legal or regulatory requirements. Are you looking to embed an environmental management plan within your organization? ISO 14001 is for you!
What are the benefits of ISO 14001 Environmental Management?
Certification to ISO 14001 allows you to:
- Better environmental management reduces waste and energy use
- Improve efficiency to cut the cost of running your business
- Demonstrate compliance to expand your business opportunities
- Meet legal obligations to win greater stakeholder and customer trust
- Prepare for the changing business landscape confidently
- Increase your access to new customers and business partners
- Enhance your reputation
Are you ready for Environmental Management?
Whether you’re new to ISO 14001 or looking to take your expertise further, we have the right training courses, resources and services. We offer packages that can be customized to your business to jumpstart your environmental management – cutting the cost of services you don’t need. An ISO 14001 package can be designed to remove the complexity of getting you where you want to be.
Getting started with ISO 14001 Environmental Management
Find the best way to get started with ISO 14001 and discover how environmental management is the right choice for your business now and in the future.
What is ISO 14001 Enviornmental Management Systems?
Environmental Management Systems (ISO 14001) is an internationally accepted standard that sets out how you can go about putting in place an effective EMS. The standard is designed to address the delicate balance between maintaining profitability and reducing environmental impact. With the commitment of your entire organization, it can enable you to achieve both objectives.
What’s in ISO 14001:
- General requirements
- Environmental policy
- Planning implementation and operation
- Checking and corrective action
- Management review
This means you can identify aspects of your business that impact on the environment and understand those environmental laws that are relevant to your situation. The next step is to produce objectives for improvement and a management programme to achieve them, with regular reviews for continual improvement. We can then periodically assess the system and, if compliant, register your company or site to ISO 14001.
What are the benefits of ISO 14001 Environmental Management?
Certifying your company’s environmental management system to ISO 14001 means that a third party, such as we have assessed that it meets the requirements set out in the standard.
Certification to ISO 14001 allows you to:
- Improve your environmental performance
- Reduce the use of resources and raw materials
- Reduce energy consumption
- Reduce waste production and waste disposal
- Strategic advantage against the competitors.
- Better administrative control.
- Transparency in the application of processes of the enterprise.
- Reliability against the customers and the suppliers.
- Continuous improvement.
For particular industries, pressure is now being exerted by many large organizations, such as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who expect their suppliers to adopt environmentally-friendly practices and may mandate ISO 14001 certification as a license to operate.
If you want to take the implementation and certification of an EMS slowly, the BS 8555 STEMS scheme allows you to phase the management system in and assess how you’re performing at each step on the path. Once completed, it still results in achieving ISO 14001 certification.
Implementing ISO 14001 EMS
Plan for your future by applying ISO 14001 to your business. Work with us to build an environmental management system that could wipe out waste and multiply new business opportunities.
Are You Ready for Implementation?
Effective environmental management becomes easier with buy-in from your whole business. And we understand that each organisation – large or small – is at a different stage with their environmental plans. That’s why we offer service packages that are as unique as you. An ISO 14001 package can include specific services that your business needs to achieve world-class environmental management – cutting the cost of services you don’t need and overcoming particular challenges.
We’ll help you shape an ISO 14001 Project Plan, working with the systems you already have in place. And we’ll help you guide your whole business through the implementation process.
Who is relevant to ISO 14001?
Environmental impact is becoming an increasingly important issue across the globe, with pressure to minimize that impact coming from a number of sources, including: local and national governments, regulators, trade associations, customers, employees and shareholders.
Social pressures are also building up from the growing array of interested parties, such as consumer, environmental and minority non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academia and neighbors.
ISO 14001 is relevant to every organization, including:
- Single site to large multi-national companies
- High risk companies to low risk service organizations
- Manufacturing, process and the service industries; including local governments
- All industry sectors including public and private sectors
- Original equipment manufacturers and their suppliers
Top tips for implementing ISO 9001
- Get commitment and support from senior management.
- Engage the whole business with good internal communication.
- Compare your existing quality systems with ISO 14001 requirements.
- Get customer and supplier feedback on current environmental management.
- Establish an implementation team to get the best results.
- Map out and share roles, responsibilities and timescales.
- Adapt the basic principles of environmental management to your business.
- Motivate staff involvement with training and incentives.
- Share ISO 14001 knowledge and encourage staff to train as internal auditors.
Certification to ISO 14001 Environmental Management
ISO 14001 certification brands your business as environmentally responsible, winning you recognition and new business opportunities. It helps you demonstrate how committed you are to reducing your environmental impacts and to meet stakeholder expectations of sustainability.
Procedure for the ISO 14001 Certification
- Pre-audit (optional)
The auditors perform a preliminary assessment. They determine if and which requirements of ISO 9001 standards have already been implemented in your company. - Certification audit
The certification process proceeds in two stages. The audit team examines if the documentation of your management system already complies with the standard. Subsequently you demonstrate the practical application and effectiveness of your management system. - Issuing the certificate
After a successful certification process your company receives the certificate. It certifies compliance with the standards and operability of your management system. - Control audits
With annual control audits we check the continuous optimization of processes and whether compliance with the ISO 9001 standards has been maintained. - Certification renewal
With a renewal of the certification before the expiration of three years, you permanently extend your continuous improvement process and document your commitment to partners and patients. - Please note: From March 2017, an initial certification will be possible only under the new ISO 9001:2015.
Maintaining your ISO 14001 system
ISO 14001 environmental management goes beyond certification, showing you how to continually improve your organization. Find out how developing and maintaining your ISO 14001 system allows you to respond effectively to changing expectations and regulations.
Make the most of your certification
You can access a number of resources designed to help you get the most out of your environmental management certification. Regular updates on the latest developments in the ISO 14001 series and other management systems will make sure you’re always up to date. You can also keep your skills relevant with our training courses. All of this, plus support from your client manager and business reviews, will help your organization to stay compliant and competitive, and to keep improving.
Stay at the right standard with Entropy®
Stay compliant and keep improving with Entropy®. The online system gives organizations of all sizes and sectors greater visibility and accountability across quality, environmental, and health and safety management systems. Gain instant access to all your documents, reduce risks and cut costs to quickly achieve best practice – and you’ll see how Entropy® makes it easy to drive daily performance.
Integrate to keep getting better
Now that you have a certified ISO 14001 environmental management system in place, you can integrate it with your other management systems. This allows you to combine and streamline the way you manage processes that apply to more than one system. Try using PAS 99 as a framework to identify and integrate common management system requirements for better performance.