FAQs
Q. What is ISO 14000?
The ISO 14000 standard addresses the “environmental management” of an organisation. This means what an organisation does to minimise harmful effects on the environment, both through what they do and the continual improvements they employ to advance their environmental performance.
The ISO 14000 family includes many guidance documents, the standard itself is denoted as ISO 14001 - and is the only one in the family that an organisation can be certified to - has evolved over several revisions. The guidance document for the ISO 14000 standard is ISO 14004.
The standard works well with the ISO 9000 quality management standard, the two standards being the most popular in the World. There are over a million organisations in 175 countries that have implemented these two standards.
ISO 14000 is similar to ISO 9000 quality management in that both relate to the process rather than to the product itself. The intention is to establish an organised approach to systematically reduce the impact of the environmental aspects which an organisation can control.
ISO/TC 207, which is responsible for the ISO 14000 family, unites expertise from participating countries and a number of international and regional organisations, plus other technical committees. .
Further Reading