ISO14001 and The Initial Clauses (the ones everybody skips)

When you go see a movie or start binge watching your new favorite show you don't jump in a third of the way through because you know that the early stuff is just pointless, it doesn't add anything or skip the first 3 or 4 chapters of your book because, well the interesting stuff is always in the middle. That 1^st part of any story is always the critical part, it's the opening act, it's where the whole story, the basis for everything is set up, it's critical to the end of the story. So why do it with your ISO14000 implementation?

For many people when they launch a new process or system, they want to dive right into the getting stuff done part, that's our default position as humans, we are convinced we need to be doing stuff. Spending all that time reading the pointless instructions is just getting in the way of the doing. It's the same with ISO14001, so many people just jump right over those 'pointless' initial clauses, we're talking about clauses 0.1 to 0.3 and 1 to 3 in ISO 14001:2015 but that's the important opening act of the process - you need to really understand it.

We thought it may be a good idea to give you a few key gems from those initial clauses to convince that you really need to go back and reread them and truly understand them, in this post we'll talk only 0.1 – 0.4 and cover 1-3 in our next post.

Clause 0.1 – General 

This is about actually making the clear strategic decision that you are going to implement the ISO14001 Quality Management System. As a leadership team, you need to have had those great, and sometimes heated, discussions about the benefits to your organisation that it will bring. If you don't then it's geniunely going to be hard to make sure everyone is onboard and aligned, and it is really all part of your leadership committment to the standard.

Discuss how wide your Environmental Management System (EMS) will be, for example, most companies see it as purely managing the CO2 impacts of their manufacturing or key operations but it's about all of your business and their impact on the environment, so think about how your finance, sales & marketing or R&D sections will fit into your EMS & make it an integrated system. This, in part, is where the uniformity comes in, it's not about your environmental system being like your last companies one or one you have seen on a youtube presentation, there will be vast differences inside your company.

You don't actually have to number your environmental system to line up with ISO 14001, it's not a requirement and in the past, it's been pretty hard to do but in the ISO14001:2015 standard it's a lot better and if you can then you certainly should line them up, not least because the other key ISO standards you will probably want to look at like ISO9001 for Quality Management and ISO45001 for Organisational Health & Safety follow the exact same structure. That structure design allows you to easily integrate all three of these standards into a single integrated manual.

The ISO14000:2015 standard doesn't really care about if you have a product or service, think about them as the same thing and just swap out the words you don't want to use.

Once you are certified, you should use your ISO14001 certification logo in everything you share with clients or potential clients, so all your sales & marketing information, emails, letterheads not forgetting of course forms, policies & procedures!

It's worth knowing that there are some key definitions to remember at the end of this clause:

• "shall" indicates a requirement; (i.e. you must do it)
  
• "should" indicates a recommendation; (i.e. you should do it)
  
• "may" indicates a permission; (i.e. you can do it if you want & it adds value)
  
• "can" indicates a possibility or a capability. (i.e. think of this as an outcome or a result)
  

Clause 0.2 Aim of an environmental management system

This clause really helps your organisation understand what the ISO14001:2015 standard is focused on, here's what it says: "The purpose of this International Standard is to provide organisations with a framework to protect the environment and respond to changing environmental conditions in balance with socio-economic needs". The key word here is framework, it's not going to tell you to do x, y or z it's going to give you a series of steps to work through and apply to your organisation to help understand and then manage your environmental impact, not your CO2 impact, your entire environmental impact. There are seven things that the standard highlights as contributing to taking a sustainable development path:

1. Protecting the environment by mitigating your environmental impact
2. Mitigating the potential adverse effects of environmental conditions on your organisation
3. Help the organisation meet their compliance obligations
4. Enhance your environmental performance
5. Control or influence the way you design your products or services, how they are manufactured, distributed, used and disposed of by getting you to take a lifecycle approach to your operation that can prevent environmental impacts or services, and to help you ensure those impacts aren't passed on to someone else within your supply chain or customer base.
6. Gaining a financial and operational advantage from implementing an environmental approach.
7. Communicating the required environmental information to the relevant interested parties.
   

A daunting list, isn't it? Don't worry, we have posts on these coming along soon, but just think about the scope and impact of those 7 points on your organisation, it's not small and so you need to consider this when looking at the time-scale and resources you are putting in place to achieve this standard.

Clause 0.3 – Success Factors

Importantly, keep in mind that just because you fully implment ISO14001 for Environmental Management Systems does'nt mean you meet all your environmental compliance requirements for the area of the world you are in. Equally your implementation of ISO14001 and another organisation's ISO14001 implementation is not going to be the same, you will have different goals, different opportunities and obligations and your policy will be entirely different. This is important, if you want to be successful you need to make it really about your own organisation and not try and copy someone else's system.

Clause 0.4 – Process Approach

For your Risk-Based thinking, it's important to look at both the positive & negative risks. Your brain is hard-wired to look for negativity first, it's what kept us alive as cavemen, so you need to put effort into the risk from a positive side, for example, if you improved in X then the risk is you double your sales!

It also talks about the need to 'adopt various forms of improvement" so these may be big bang breakthrough change improvements, kaizen style events, innovation or even a change to your organisational structure that yields an improvement in some way. Build it into your system from the start.

That's' a lot of thinking just for a few short, 'simple' clauses that I bet you skipped over so here's your homework, go back and reread them, at least twice, get your colleagues to do it as well and then compare notes, only then can you move forward.