Basic introduction

According to the demand of sustainable development and to promote environmental protection work, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) officially promulgated ISO 14001 environmental management system standard in 1996 and was revised twice in 2004 and 2015.  Its basic idea is to guide the organization to establish the self-restraint mechanism of environmental management according to the PDCA mode.  From high-level leaders to every employee, they should deal with the relationship between their own development and environmental protection in an active and conscious spirit, continually improve environmental performance, carry out effective pollution prevention, and realize the organization's benign development. It requires an organization to establish an environmental management system to achieve the objectives of supporting environmental protection, pollution prevention and continual improvement, and to demonstrate the conformity of its environmental management system and the level of environmental management to the outside world by obtaining the certification by a third-party certification body.

Standard features

1.  Voluntary principle

2.  Wide applicability

3.  Strengthened leadership role

4.  Put forward strategic management thinking

5.  Risk-based thinking is adopted

6.  More emphasis on improving environmental performance

7.  Strengthened compliance obligations

8.  Commitment to expand from pollution prevention to environmental protection

9.  Emphasize the integration of environmental management system into the business process of the organization

10. Clearly require the use of a life cycle perspective

Significance of implementation

1.  Improve the environmental behavior of the organization and avoid legal risk and environmental risk

2.  Improve the management level of enterprises and provide scientific management mechanism for pollution prevention and sustainable development

3.  Promote energy saving, consumption reduction and cost reduction of enterprises

4.  Improve the market competitiveness of enterprises

5.  Improve the awareness of enterprises to abide by the law independently and promote the implementation of environmental laws and regulations and management system in China

6.  Improve the management level of the enterprise and the environmental awareness of all employees