Environmental Analysis

Throughout this article, we will refer to "environmental analysis" as the document identifying the environmental aspects of an organization's products and services, as defined in chapter 431 of the ISO 14001 standard. We will deliberately deviate from the definition given in the EMAS regulation, which requires compliance with the provisions of Annex 1 of the regulation. Among other things, this document must list applicable regulatory requirements, identify the risk of environmental accidents, and identify indirect environmental aspects over which the organization can have an influence.

These provisions are also covered by the ISO 14001 standard, but at other levels of management system organization; for example, regulatory monitoring (chap. 432) is the subject of specific provisions, as is the identification of emergency situations (chap. 447) and the control of certain outsourced operations (chap. 446).

The ISO 14001 environmental analysis consists of an analysis of an organization's activities, products and services that are likely to have an impact on the environment. This analysis should enable the organization to identify which of its activities, products and services have or may have a significant environmental impact, and which it can consider improving.

The relevance of the analysis is crucial to the effectiveness of the environmental management system. The organization must not lose sight of the fact that this approach must itself form part of a continuous improvement process. This process must demonstrate the organization's ability to keep this analysis up to date, particularly when changes or developments are likely to occur in the processes, products or equipment used by the organization. Initially, it is important to identify the most significant impacts, and then progressively study the possibility of addressing other environmental impacts.

It's easy to agree that the quality of this analysis will depend on the relevance with which the organization judges an aspect to be significant or not.

It is also important to point out that, while environmental analysis of the impact of activities and, to a lesser extent, the services associated with these activities is generally well taken into account by organizations, the same cannot be said of the environmental impact of the products they market... In the majority of cases, organizations "skip" this part of the analysis, which may well be complex, but which nonetheless constitutes a non-conformity with the requirements of ISO 14001.

The completeness of the analysis and the method used to identify significant environmental aspects are important factors in the quality of the analysis. It is also necessary to...