Businesses around the world are positioning themselves for the green economy. This article provides an outline of primary elements required to acheive sustainability as it relates to your green business under the ISO 14001 standard (Environmental Management System). Presented is a step-by-step process to reduce your carbon footprint. If you think its easy, its not.  But, it will pay-off.

ISO 14001 is Based on Plan-Do-Check-Act:

• Plan: establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the organization’s environmental policy

• Do: implement the processes

• Check: monitor and measure processes against environmental policy, objectives, targets, legal and other requirements and report the results

• Act: take actions to continually improve performance of your Environmental Management System (EMS)

General Requirements:

Your business needs to establish, document, implement, maintain and continually improve an EMS and determine how it will fulfill the following requirements.

• Make sure that you have a plan to continuously improve your environmental management system. Too often, the scope statement is static. It needs to be “alive”!

• Common Pitfall: Having no scope statement or one that is extremely vague (i.e. XYZ business is a good environmental citizen).

Environmental Policy:

• The environmental policy must be appropriate to the nature, scale and environmental impacts of its activities

• Must include commitment to continual improvement and prevention of pollution

• Must include commitment to comply with applicable legal requirements

• Must be communicated to all persons working for or on behalf of the organization

• Must be available to the public

Environmental Aspect:

Identify environmental features or characteristics within processes of your business.

• An aspect is anything that your business does that can have an impact on the environment

• Aspects can be positive or negative

• Aspects must be identified and kept up to date

• Lessons learned: Set measuring stick and rank aspects by importance and severity. Determine which aspects are significant.

• Common pitfall: Not keeping the list of aspects up to date = stale aspects.

Legal and Other Requirements:

Legal requirements to which your business subscribes must be identified and procedures must exist to determine how requirements apply to environmental aspects.

• Lessons learned: Identification of legal and other requirements can be easily done through subscription to monthly periodicals which report changes to federal and state law

• Pitfalls: Don’t forget local statutes. They count too!

Objectives, Targets and Programs:

You need to establish, implement and maintain documented environmental objectives and targets, at relevant functions and levels within your business.

• Lessons Learned: Have a target for every objective. Keep it current.

• Common pitfall: “Pie in the sky” objectives that can’t be measured or proven. (Objectives that don’t match the aspects).

Please get ready for “Green Certification Part II:  Here’s How To Do It”.