ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management System

ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management System provides a framework to protect the environment and respond to changing environmental conditions in balance with socio-economic needs.

“What is the environment?”
The environment is the domain and the circumstances in which an organization carries out its activities; such as air, water, soil, natural resources, flora, fauna, people and their mutual relations. Environmental problems can often manifest themselves as pollution, consumption of resources, noise and odour. In general, such environmental impacts arise from the environmental aspects of the organization, i.e., an element of the organization’s activities or products or services that interact or may interact with the environment.

So why should we, as an organization, need the ISO 14001:2015 standard?

The purpose of the environmental management system is to provide organizations with a framework to protect the environment and respond to changing environmental conditions in balance with socio-economic needs.

When organizations want to operate the environmental management system; aims to increase environmental performance, fulfil compliance obligations and achieve environmental objectives.

The benefits of this standard are defined as follows;

• Preventing or mitigating negative environmental impacts, protecting the environment,
• Mitigate the potential negative effects of environmental conditions on the organization,
• Using a life cycle approach that can prevent environmental impacts from increasing unintentionally during the life cycle,
• Providing financial and operational benefits that could result from environmentally sound alternatives that strengthen the organization’s position in the market,
• Sharing environmental information with relevant parties

In this sense, if we want to establish the environmental management system in our organization and operate this standard, the most important thing we need to do is to determine an appropriate policy and determine our targets and actions accordingly.

You can find the basic benefits of ISO 14001 publication published by ISO in the link.