Environmental Management Systems and ISO 14000 in Australia – on

The ISO 14001 voluntary international environmental management standard, mostly used in the manufacturing industry, could be used in agricultural settings to increase quality of environmental management and decrease risk of environmental problems. Associated benefits might include reduced operating costs, increased competitiveness, and circumvention of future trade barriers. To see whether experts thought such benefits were likely, I sent an Internet-based survey to 306 of them: 91 agricultural academic faculty in California, Colorado, and Wisconsin, 124 agricultural consultants throughout the US and Canada, and 91 ISO registrars/auditors, mostly in the US. I obtained 86 responses, a 28% response rate. All three groups agreed that dealing with environmental issues is an important aspect of agricultural management, and somewhat less strongly that there is a need for systematic management of environmental issues in agriculture. The consultants and registrars also agreed that most environmental issues at agricultural operations should be addressed with a formal environmental management system. The academics were generally unaware of the ISO 14001 standard, and hence were, of necessity, neutral on its utility, but none of the three groups was strongly familiar with the standard. Subsequent questions dealing with the utility of the standard generally met with lukewarm responses, with the registrars tending to be more positive than the consultants who were in turn, more positive than the academics. Most of the responses were highly variable within each group, however, indicating a range of opinion at this stage, and certainly no consensus. ISO 14001 is a voluntary international environmental management system standard, developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a consortium of most of the world’s countries’ national standards agencies. The committees that set the standards are primarily made up of representatives of industry. Hence, they are non-governmental and non-regulatory... essentially industry self-help groups that normally serve to keep manufactured product standards uniform worldwide. A few years ago ISO ventured into the management arena with its ISO 9000 total quality management series of standards. These have become widely adopted as indicators of systematic quality manufacturing. Essentially, ISO 9000 requires a company to document how it does things in detail, to work to achieve continuous improvement, then to monitor (audit) itself to be sure it continues to do what it says it is doing. Companies usually hire third-party registrars and auditors to formalize certification and to enhance credibility. ISO 9000 has been widely adopted and is commonly thought to pay for itself in cost savings and often, to provide competitive advantage. Because of the success of ISO 9000, industry felt that a similar cost-saving and competitively valuable effort could be made in dealing with environmental issues. ISO 14001, promulgated in 1996, was the result. ISO 14001 provides general direction for setting up an environmental management system (EMS) to identify and monitor an organization’s environmental aspects,