Environmental management system certification refers to the assessment of the environmental management system of the supplier (producer) by a third-party notary agency based on the publicly released environmental management system standards (ISO14000 environmental management series standards). The qualified ones will be issued with environmental management system certification by the third-party agency and registered and announced to prove that the supplier has the environmental assurance ability to provide products or services in accordance with the established environmental protection standards and regulations. Through environmental management system certification, it can be confirmed whether the raw materials, production processes, processing methods used by the manufacturer, and the use and post-use disposal of products meet the requirements of environmental protection standards and regulations.
The Chinese name of ISO14001 is "Environmental Management System Specifications and Usage Guide", which was officially promulgated in September 1996.
Environmental Management System Certification Environmental Management System (EMS, Environmental Management System)
According to the definition of 3.5 of ISO14001: The environmental management system is a component of the comprehensive management system within an organization. It includes the organizational structure, planning activities, organizational responsibilities, practices, procedures, processes and resources required for the formulation, implementation, realization, review and maintenance of environmental policies. It also includes management aspects such as the organization's environmental policies, goals and indicators.
The environmental management system can be described as follows: This is an organization's planned and coordinated management activities, which include standardized action procedures and documented control mechanisms. It is implemented through an organizational structure with clear responsibilities and obligations, with the aim of preventing adverse effects on the environment.
Principle 1: Commitment and policy
An organization should develop an environmental policy and ensure that environmental management is committed to the environmental management system.
Principle 2: Planning
An organization should plan to achieve its environmental policy.
Principle 3: Implementation
In order to implement effectively, an organization should provide the capabilities and assurance mechanisms required to achieve its environmental policy, objectives and targets.
Principle 4: Measurement and evaluation
An organization should measure, monitor and evaluate its environmental performance.
Principle 5: Review and improvement
An organization should review and continuously improve its environmental management system with the goal of improving overall environmental performance.
Based on the above principles, it is best to regard the environmental management system as an organizational framework, which requires continuous monitoring and regular review to adapt to changing internal and external factors and effectively guide the organization's environmental activities. Every member of the organization should assume the responsibility for environmental improvement.
ISO14000 environmental management system standard is an effective tool for creating green enterprises, and it is an internationally accepted standard. Through standard certification, it can effectively promote enterprises to carry out environmental management work and sustainable development. ISO14000 is a standard applicable to any organization. Due to the differences in specific situations between industries and organizations, many organizations cannot understand this feature of the standard. The wide applicability of the standard reflects that the standard is a basic standard and a management framework. Each organization must first understand the essence of the standard before implementing the standard on this basis. In particular, ISO14000 is a standard related to environmental management. How to grasp environmental benefits, social benefits and corporate benefits is a difficult problem. According to practical work experience, the guiding principles for implementing ISO14001 are mainly:
1. Environmental management serves the improvement of environmental problems in society
Generally speaking, the business management of an organization serves the needs of its own development, but the fundamental goal of environmental management is to meet the needs of social environmental protection and sustainable development. In many cases, environmental protection and corporate development are a pair of sharp contradictions. In order to survive and develop, enterprises will choose the latter without considering environmental protection. With the deterioration of the global environmental situation, it is urgent to protect and improve the environment, the public's environmental awareness is gradually increasing, and the government's environmental management laws and regulations are becoming increasingly stringent. Therefore, enterprises must implement environmental management.
2. The role of leadership
The high attention and strong leadership of the top management of the enterprise are the guarantee for the implementation of environmental management by the enterprise and the key to success. Since the top management is the decision-making level of the organization, it determines and controls the development of the organization, and at the same time provides financial, human and other guarantees for management activities, and plays a coordinating and guiding role in the implementation process, so the role of leadership is important. In environmental management, there are two main manifestations that the leadership role cannot be well played: First, the leadership cannot understand the environmental issues well, cannot make decisions and judgments in this regard, and only assigns this work to a certain department, which often leads to large deviations. Second, the leadership is weak and cannot coordinate the management of various departments well, which makes the environmental management work very difficult and often fails halfway. The reason for the above problems is that the leadership quality is low and it is not competent for the job. One of the leadership selection and training mechanisms in my country is to exercise and train on the job, which is very unfavorable to management work. Every position, whether it is the top leadership or ordinary operation position, needs competent employees to take up the post, so that the role of the position can be fully exerted. "On-the-job training" means that the employee is incompetent. In the process before training him into a competent person, the incompetence of the employee caused many deviations in work, and some results were very unfavorable. Especially in the environmental management process, incompetent personnel should not be allowed to work, because once environmental problems are caused, the consequences are serious and irreversible.
3. All employees participate in environmental management work
Environmental management is a management work, but it does not mean that management work is only the business of management. If employee participation in management can be well grasped, it will be very helpful for management. In the environmental management of enterprises, it is found that managers do not communicate effectively with employees, but only give orders to employees, so employees do not understand or even resist the orders, so that the orders cannot be effectively executed. When the orders cannot be effectively executed, managers are more willing to attribute it to the low quality of employees, which makes this problem unsolvable.
4. Implement process control
A process refers to a system of activities that convert inputs into resources used for output. The purpose of a process is to increase its value. Any activity can be managed as a process. Process management can greatly improve efficiency.
In the general production process, the result of production is a tangible product, so there are two ways to control the result: one is to directly control the production result - the product, which generally adopts the inspection method to eliminate unqualified products; the other is to control the production process to reduce the possibility of unqualified products. The first method is widely used and can effectively control product quality, but the company's losses are large because defective products have to be reworked or scrapped. This is a huge waste of resources. Process control can significantly reduce this kind of waste and ensure quality. Environmental management also has similar situations: end-of-pipe treatment and process control. End-of-pipe treatment refers to the development and implementation of effective treatment technologies for pollutants generated at the end of the production process. End-of-pipe treatment is an important stage in the development of environmental management. It is conducive to eliminating pollution incidents and also slows down the trend of environmental pollution and damage caused by production activities to a certain extent. However, as time goes by and the industrialization process accelerates, the limitations of end-of-pipe treatment are becoming increasingly apparent. First, the investment in pollution treatment facilities is large and the operating costs are high, which increases the production costs of enterprises and reduces economic benefits. Second, end-of-pipe treatment is often not a thorough treatment, but a transfer of pollutants, such as flue gas desiccation and dust removal to form a large amount of waste residue, and centralized wastewater treatment produces a large amount of sludge, so it cannot eradicate pollution. Third, end-of-pipe treatment does not involve the effective use of resources and cannot stop the waste of natural resources. Therefore, to truly solve the pollution problem, it is necessary to implement process control, reduce the generation of pollution, and fundamentally solve environmental problems.
5. Continuous improvement
Continuous improvement is an important means for an organization to actively seek opportunities for improvement and strive to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Since environmental problems are a problem of continuous development and continuous improvement, the goal of environmental management is continuous improvement, which is also in line with the principle of sustainable development.
It is relatively easy for enterprises to take measures to improve environmental performance. After the environment is improved, it is also possible to maintain the existing level of environmental management and environmental management performance. However, it is more difficult to improve management performance because managers lack the awareness of continuous improvement. For "improvement", enterprise managers understand it more as reaching or satisfying standards through improvement when standards are not met or not satisfied. This kind of work cannot actually be called "improvement", but just a kind of "correction". "Improvement" should refer to the continuous improvement of the standards to be met. Due to the improvement of standards, if the enterprise can still meet the standards through efforts, then the enterprise is "improving". It is not enough to make "improvement" once. From the perspective of the long-term development of the enterprise and environmental protection requirements, what the enterprise needs is "continuous improvement".
