Environmental Management Systems

Acknowledged environmental management systems (EMS)

Practical experience has proved that three main rules should be taken into account when dealing with the basic requirements to be observed by an efficient environmental management:

Leaving aside the provisional environmental management systems mentioned above, we shall revise the main EMS types employed at European and international levels.

Since 1992 three reference documents have been acknowledged and applied worldwide for the development, implementation and operation of an EMS. These are the following: BS 7750, EMAS, ISO 14001. Further on we will present the three documents, although in 1996 BS 7750 was replaced with ISO 14001, which is an international standard.

BS 7750

This is the first environmental standard issued and applied worldwide. The British Standards Institute (BSI) developed it in 1992 entitled “Specification for Environmental Management Systems”. BS 7750 was conceived by employing an approach similar to the one used in developing the norms for the quality management system (QMS) existing at that time: BS 5750, EN 29000 and BS EN ISO 9000 (unified in 1994 under the title ISO 9000 - 1994). The basic idea was that this national standard would be assimilated into an international standard ISO, which actually happened in 1996 when the ISO 14001 norms were issued.

After its issuance in 1992, BS 7750 was checked during a one-year pilot program. As a consequence of the results obtained and the comments formulated by various organizations, the system was revised in 1994 in order to be harmonized with the EMSA norms, which had just been issued.

EMAS

EMAS is the title of the Regulation no. 1836/93 of the European Commission, also known as the Eco-Audit Regulation. It allows the voluntary participation and the adherence of European industrial companies to the European Community’s eco-management and audit scheme. The BSI and the General Directorate XI developed the EMAS norms, initially using BS 7750 as a model. Afterwards, several successive revisions were made to render the 2 systems compatible. EMAS was enforced on July 13, 1993 and became operational in all Member States in April 1995. There are significant differences between EMAS and ISO 14001, which will be presented in a table within the next chapter.

ISO 14001

The standard ISO 14001 is a basic component of the ISO 14000 series. The exact title of the standard in its Romanian version is “SR EN ISO 14001 Sisteme de Management de Mediu - Specificatii si ghid de utilizare”.

ISO 14000 was formally adopted as an international standard in September 1996. Moreover, the European Commission for Standardization (ECS) adopted it as a European standard. In November 1997 ISO 14000 was also adopted as a Romanian standard. After the issuance of the ISO 14000 norms, all national standards related to environmental management systems (including BS 7750) were replaced by the new norms.

Other environmental standards are being and will be developed in order to complete the ISO 14001 norms. The most relevant norm for the EMS implementation is ISO 14004 “Environmental Management Systems - Guide on the implementation principles, systems and techniques”, which was adopted as an international standard concurrently with the issuance of ISO 14001, and as a Romanian standard in 1998.

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