The ISO 14001 standard details the requirements for environmental management systems. We can guide you through a review of your operations and their impact on the environment. This will ensure that your management systems achieve ISO 14001 certification.
The current version of the ISO 14001 standard is very similar to the structure of ISO 9001. It requires organisations to communicate that they have a defined structure with clear roles and responsibilities for individuals. Additionally, the standard requires that prospective organisations demonstrate document control, that risks and opportunities are considered and actions to address these are identified and implemented.
Therefore, it is important to demonstrate that there are effective resources and checks in place for the organisation to be able to respond to any environmental incidents such as spillage. This can be done through the completion of a formal review of environmental impacts to show that the organisation’s emergency response has been reviewed and processes put in place to respond to incidents and mitigate impact on the environment.
This standard can be applied by office-based organisations. To demonstrate compliance organisations need to: –
- Provide evidence of a formal review of compliance obligations
- Exhibit maintenance of a register of environmental legislation
- Show that they have a mechanism for reviewing and updating their environmental management systems
Meeting the requirements of the standard
There are various clauses in ISO 14001 which require all prospective organisations to produce and retain a range of documentation. Document requirements include a Management Review, Internal Audits and an Environmental Policy.
We do not start you from a blank page. We bring a complete, ready-built library of management system documentation with us. Policies, procedures, registers, risk assessments, audit checklists and training material, already mapped to the clauses of ISO 14001. That material is then tailored to the way your business actually runs, rather than your business being reshaped to fit a template. It is the single biggest reason a fixed-price engagement can hold to a predictable timescale: the writing is largely done, so the work is in adapting it, implementing it and building the evidence.
See our ISO consultancy service for how onsite and remote delivery works, or our system implementation service for what the build stage involves.
How ISO 14001 certification works
We take you all the way to ISO 14001 certification, and certification is guaranteed, backed by a 100% success rate. We build the management system around the way your business already works, support you through your internal audit and management review so your team owns them, and close out anything an assessor would otherwise raise before the audit rather than after it.
The system we leave you with is integrated and meant to be used. It should not add workload or complexity to how you already run, and if it does then it has been built wrong. By the time the assessor arrives your people know the system and can answer for it, because it is theirs.
It is a fixed price, agreed before we start, with payment by milestones or monthly instalments. Consultancy clients also get our ISO and legal update service at no extra cost, so the system does not quietly go out of date once we have finished.
We help you choose the right certification body too, based on an objective review of what you actually need rather than who we happen to know: whether accreditation is required by your customers and tenders, what the full three-year cycle costs, and how quickly a body can realistically get an assessor to you. Lead times vary far more than prices do. Our guide to choosing a certification body works through all three.
Benefits of ISO 14001 Certification
- Achieve better scores in pre-qualification questionnaires (PQQ’s)
- Improved control of internal processes and operations that may impact upon the environment
- Improved environmental performance and consequently reduced risk of fines
- Formal review of management systems helps ensure that organisational operations are legally compliant
- Ensures that the organisation has developed and implemented emergency preparedness processes