There’s no doubt that environmental impact has become a huge consideration for businesses in recent years. If we don’t start reducing our carbon emissions, we won’t have a planet to protect for much longer.
Yet, despite the increased focus on sustainability, many organisations still have no idea where to start and wrongly believe that ISO 14001 will provide all the answers.
But ISO 14001 isn’t a magic bullet that will transform your business into a carbon-neutral organisation.
What is ISO 14001?
ISO 14000 is a family of standards relating to environmental management, and ISO 14001 defines the criteria for an Environmental Management System (EMS).
In other words, ISO 14001 is a framework. And achieving certification demonstrates that you have successfully implemented that framework.
ISO 14001 shares many traits with ISO 9001 (the standard for quality), which is why many businesses choose to implement both standards side by side.
Will ISO 14001 help you become carbon neutral?
You can become carbon neutral with or without ISO 14001, but gaining ISO 14001 certification doesn’t guarantee carbon neutrality.
The aim of ISO 14001 is to help you continually improve your environmental performance and comply with any industry legislation and regulations. It does this by giving you the framework for an effective Environmental Management System (EMS).
While the ISO framework will help you measure and understand how your activities impact the environment, it won’t tell you how to reduce that impact. You’ll need to do the work on that yourself.
However, even though having an EMS doesn’t guarantee carbon neutrality, it does give you a strategy tool that, if utilised effectively, can help you achieve it.
What are the benefits of an EMS?
An Environmental Management System is exactly what it sounds like – a system for managing anything your business does that relates to the environment. This includes your energy use, GHG emissions, water use, wastewater outputs, waste management and so on.
Improve compliance and efficiency
One of the key aims of ISO 14001 is to help you ensure compliance with your industry regulations and wider legislation.
Documenting policies and procedures and monitoring, measuring and recording data is a huge part of this, and an effective EMS helps you do it more accurately and efficiently. The data should then be used to continually improve your processes.
This shouldn’t be viewed as a tick box exercise. View it as an opportunity to keep improving your business performance and your bottom line.
Integrate environmental management with strategy
There’s no point simply stating that you want to be more eco-friendly if you aren’t putting actions in place to make this happen.
Having an EMS helps everyone in the business understand the impacts you are having on the environment. You can then use the data to determine your targets and integrate these targets into your business strategy so you can continuously improve your processes and reduce your emissions.
Make reducing your carbon emissions part of your business vision and be clear and specific about your goals and how you will achieve them.
Understand the entire product lifecycle
When thinking about our environmental impact, it’s easy to focus solely on the things happening within day-to-day operations. An EMS forces you to look beyond the obvious and examine the entire product lifecycle.
Where do your raw materials come from? How sustainable are they, and what are your suppliers doing to reduce their own carbon footprint?
And what about after your products have been purchased? What happens at the end of their life? Can they be recycled, refurbished or reused? How can you help your customers achieve this? Can you offer a collection and recycling service or incentives for returning products at the end of their life?
Get employees engaged
ISO shouldn’t be the responsibility of one person; it works best when everyone is engaged.
If improving your environmental performance is part of your business strategy, then every employee should work towards that goal.
When organisations start to prioritise environmental responsibility and sustainability, it becomes part of the company culture, and employees carry it through to their personal lives. They then start to raise awareness in the wider community, and it has a positive knock-on effect, which is great for the good of the planet.
Is the certification worth the effort?
Having the certificate demonstrates that you are compliant and are measuring your environmental impact. It can improve your reputation, give you a competitive edge and enable you to tender for more lucrative contracts.
But, as outlined above, many of the real benefits come from having an effective EMS, regardless of whether you get the certificate to prove you have one.
Getting started
If you want help obtaining ISO 14001 certification or are interested in implementing an efficient and effective EMS, we can help. We always focus on implementing the frameworks in a way that works for your business. When this is done successfully, getting the certification is simple.
The first step is a no-obligation chat to find out more about your objectives. Then we can carry out a gap analysis to identify what actions are needed to get you ISO ready.
If you’d like to find out more about any of the ISO standards or want to get started with your ISO journey, get in touch.
Contact us on 0113 418 2579 to find out how we could help your organisation grow and thrive.
