ISO 14001 certification in Kurdistan

Any organization big or small, across various sectors, can use ISO 14001 to improve their environmental conservation and promote sustainability.

Understanding EMS Goals and their Environmental Effects:

Let’s break down a main rule based on ISO standards it requires recognizing how your company’s activities, goods, or services might touch nature. How can they interact with the environment the good and the bad? This interaction is known as “environmental aspects“. This interaction can lead to changes in the environment good or bad, big or small. We refer to these as “environmental impacts“. Picture it in your company, you make a list of all activities that might have an effect. This could include things like waste, gas, electricity and water use, transportation, oil, chemicals, etc. Each of these create groups, and smaller groups, like electricity use split into lighting, air conditioning, and equipment use. But you can’t just think about the clear stuff. You need to look beyond basic operations. Consider your maintenance team, office areas, heating and cooling systems, parking, even things done by your contractors and suppliers. Every single interaction with the environment matters. Then, outline the possible costs of these aspects.

For example, let’s think about photocopying, a typical office task. It uses paper and electricity. These are the environmental aspects of the task. The environmental impact here is using up resources. Trees are used for paper and oil or gas for electricity. Both of these resources can run out.

Now what? You need to set a scoring system based on severity, frequency, and detection relevant to your organization’s environmental policy.

Add context legal regulations, potential environmental damage, stakeholders’ reactions, and the quantity of waste involved this compilation lets you recognize which environmental aspects are high risk and need immediate objective setting and action planning.

Set clear long-term and short-term goals. For instance, you could aim to reduce waste output by a certain percentage in year one goals should be carefully thought about and should align with your environmental policy, initial review, and aspect-impact evaluation.

Ultimately, this list of environmental aspects and impacts helps shape your Environmental Management System (EMS), Identifying your environmental aspects and impacts accurately will not only save you precious time but lay the foundation for a truly effective EMS.