ISO 14001:2004 Consultancy
The Origins of ISO14001
Organisations of all kinds are increasingly concerned with minimising their impact on the environment. This concern is driven by a number of factors, including increasingly stringent legislation, the development of economic policies and other measures that foster environmental protection, and increased concern expressed by groups in the wider community about environmental matters and sustainable development.
After the success of the ISO 9000 series of quality standards, the International Standards Organisation published the ISO 14000 series of standards for environmental management. As part of this series, ISO14001:2004 has been developed to provide organisations with a structure for their environmental management systems (EMS) which helps them achieve both environmental and economic goals. It also allows an organisation to seek third party certification of its EMS, which can be used to assure interested parties that an effective EMS is in place.
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Why you need ISO 14001
There are many benefits to be gained from implementing an Environmental Management System and achieving third party certification to ISO 14001:2004. It ensures the organisation is aware of, and complies with, all applicable legislation, and demonstrates to stakeholders a commitment to the environment. It also enables you to identify those areas of your business with the biggest impact on the environment and enables you to implement programmes to reduce or eliminate those impacts. It is increasingly a requirement for companies wishing to respond to tender opportunities, particularly in the public sector. There is also the potential to reduce business costs both in insurance premiums and by reducing waste.
How can we help?
As with all standards, ISO14001 requires you to formally document certain areas of your business, in this case relating to your environmental policy and to keep evidence (records) that demonstrate you are operating according to the requirements of the standard. We are able to assist with all stages of this process.
The standard itself takes a risk assessment based approach to environmental management. To implement it we can help you to build an understanding of your environmental impacts and performance, and to write a policy statement that communicates your environmental values to stakeholders.
We can then assist you in conducting an environmental risk assessment to determine significant issues, identify areas for improvement and set objectives and targets for improvement.
Once targets have been defined, we can help you develop and implement management programs to achieve them, and to periodically monitor and measure to check the programmes are effective.
Our consultants have considerable experience of developing and implementing management systems for certification to ISO 14001:2004, and an understanding of the environmental issues facing businesses. We can assist with any or all of the above stages, making the process run more quickly and smoothly than it might otherwise. We will also endeavour to transfer knowledge to your staff as this is essential for the management system to function efficiently.
We also have experience of certification and can liaise with the certification body and help interpret the findings of certification audits to ensure the actions taken to address them are adequate. In the longer term, once certification is achieved we can help maintain the system, perform internal audits, attend surveillance audits and provide any other expert advice or assistance required.
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