Integration of Environmental Management Systems

Environmental management system is a tool used in maintaining, monitoring and implementing environmental policies, waste management and pollution control of an organization. This helps the organization to comply with the minimum legal standards put forward by the regulating body. ISO 14001 and 9001 are certification based on these standards. In this article we’ll look at integrating these two into your organization.

Processes required

Environmental policy

This process involve the usage of existing policy making process to create or improvise policies, it is also used to edit the existing policies to add new features. This is relatively easy compared to creating a new and stand alone EMS system; you can add only the necessary requirements to meet the revised standards.

Legal requirements

This process is important for identifying the environmental legal requirements that are applicable to your organization. It also helps you ensure that your organization is up to date about the changes in requirements and comply with them. The knowledge of latest requirements and its application in your organization is important for the following step.

Environmental aspects

This is one of the important steps involved in integrating ISO 14001, in this process you are require to asses all the processes of your organization that interact with the environment and determine which is significant and which is not. After identifying the significant processes and its effect on the environment, the operational controls and criteria required to keep the processes from negatively impacting the environment is determined.

Targets and How to achieve it?

You’ll need to add targets and programs required to achieve them to your existing Environmental Management System in order to integrate ISO 14001 with ISO 9001. So the new targets and programs are created and managed and personalize them according to the requirement of your organization.

Using the existing system to its full potential

To make the integration process effective and cost efficient it is important to use the existing processes and system to its full potential. There already exists a policy and objective creation along with dissemination. Important characteristics can be added to this existing one rather than starting a new process. Documentation of the control and communication of information of the management already is present in the existing system; this can be utilized for the ISO 14001.

By identifying the existing parts of your EMS can help you save time and effort which will be wasted in creating new processes out of scratch if the existing ones are not identified.