A Study on the Impacts of ISO 14001:2015 Certification on Organisational Environmental Performance

Abstract

Improper management of industrial resources, energy consumption and pollution can create serious damage to the global environment and human health. All these environmental impacts generate a need for the international standards on Environmental Management System (EMS) that is compliance with common standard applicable to industry which is irrespective of country, location, or sector that encourages the sustainable development with less use of recourses,less wastes disposals, less emissions of air pollutants and prevention of environmental accidents.ISO14001:2015 is a generic standard that specifies the requirements of EMS and acceptable universally for this purpose. The general objective of this study is to identify the critical factors which affect the environmental management practices in Sri Lankan industries with respect to the number of employees and their intended market. The primary data were collected from environmental managers, quality mangers and general managers via questionnaires and structured interviews. Top management commitment, application compliance and requirements, operational control, monitoring and measurements, resource management and improvement were identified as critical factors that affect the EMS. The levels of presence of these above six factors in the organisations were analysed as the next phase of this study. The findings of the study reveal that all the six critical factors which affect the EMS have shown significant positive impacts on both large scale organizations and export oriented organizations. The large scale organisations have seriously concern about their environmental issues. Therefore they are committed to obtain the critical factors of ISO 14001:2015. The export oriented organisations are strictly maintaining ISO14001:2015 in order to increase their market reputation.
Keywords: ISO 14001:2015, Environmental management systems