Section 4.3.1 Environmental aspects of the ISO 14001 environmental management system (EMS) standard specifies that an organization establish and maintain a procedure or procedures to identify the environmental aspects of its activities, products, or services that it can control and over which it can be expected to have an influence, in order to determine those which have or can have significant impacts on the environment. As the standard does not specify how an organization is to identify its environmental aspects some organizations struggle with development of a procedure and the identification of aspects. To develop the procedure and ultimately identify your aspects consider doing the following:
- Review each process at your facility and break the process down into activities or steps
- Identify what environmental interactions are a result of each activity or step in the process
- From this list of environmental interactions (i.e., aspects) identify all environmental impacts including positive, negative and potential impacts.
Once this is done each environmental aspect can be ranked to determine the "significant" aspects of the organizations operations.
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