ISO 14001 Environmental Management System is a management standard dedicated to controlling environmental pollution risks. EMS (Environmental Management System) establishes mechanisms that progressively reduce these risks and the number of incidents, enhancing the organization's reliability in meeting environmental protection legal and other requirements.

The ISO 14000 series of standards aims to support environmental protection and prevent pollution, based on the following principles:

• Environmental protection system (EMS) should lead to improvement in environmental protection performance.
• Improvement should be continuous.
• When establishing an environmental protection system for the first time, the organization should start with what is the obvious benefit, which is compliance with the law.
• Once EMS takes shape, procedures for its further improvement can be applied.
• Integrating EMS with other management systems can lead to greater overall system efficiency.
• The quality management system is based on a mechanism of continuous improvement, known as the Deming cycle or continuous improvement cycle, as in ISO 9000.

 

The ISO 14000 series consists of several standards, the main ones being:

• ISO 14001 - Environmental Management Systems - Requirements, and
• ISO 14004 - EMS, General guidelines on principles, systems, and support techniques.

The purpose of these two standards is:

• ISO 14001, management system assessment, and
• ISO 14004, guidelines for implementing standard requirements.

ISO 14004 is similar in content to ISO 14001, but each chapter is supplemented with guidelines and illustrations to facilitate the application of ISO 14001. ISO 14001 defines requirements for environmental management. Fulfilling these requirements needs to be documented to provide evidence of compliance with the standard and effective operation in accordance with the standard. ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems is written so that organizations of all types and sizes can apply it and can be adapted to different geographic, cultural, and social conditions. ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems is a managerial tool that enables organizations of any size to:

• identify and control the impact of their activities, products, and services on the environment,
• improve their environmental performance,
• implement a systematic approach to achieving environmental protection objectives and provide evidence that they have achieved set objectives.

 

The implementation of an Environmental Management System can relate to the entire company, one branch, or just one work process, with the choice largely depending on the company's needs. The main reasons leading to the expressed need for the introduction of ISO 14001 environmental protection systems are:

• continuous environmental pollution,
• fear of complete depletion of natural resources,
• lack of organized and systematic monitoring of pollution consequences,
• increased public interest in environmental preservation,
• legal solutions,
• specific working conditions in endangered areas.

ISO 14001 has conceptual similarities with ISO 9001, while on the other hand, collaboration between authors (TC176/TC207) has achieved clear process compatibility. In principle, we can talk about two groups of requirements of these two standards by similarity: identical or very similar and related, and specific to a particular standard. Almost identical or similar requirements of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001:

• documentation,
• records,
• internal audit,
• management representative,
• management review.

This allows for the easy integration of documentation and management systems.

 

For more detailed information, visit the official ISO 14001 standard page.