SE «Ukrmetrteststandard»

Environmental management system is the specific tool that gives to the organization the following possibilities:

• to define the ecological aspects of its activity, products or services;
• to evaluate its influence on the environment;
• to develop and implement the measures in order to avoid the contamination;
• to establish the control of influence and use the corrective measures;
• to define the used eological legislative and normative requirements;
• to provide the activity according to the ecological legislation of Ukraine;
• to define and reach the ecological goals;
• to improve the ecological characteristics;
• to balance and integrate the economic and ecological interests;
• to adapt in time to the constantly changing conditions.

To the potential advantages connected with the implementation of the effective quality management system refer the following:

• improvement of the reputation of the organization among society, public authorities, investors;
• improvement of the interrelation between suppliers and consumers;

• drawing up the contracts of insurance with acceptablepayments;
• obtaining of the righnt of reduced taxation;
• improvement of the expenses management;
• reduction of number of incidents leading to legal liabilities;
• saving of raw materials, materials and energy.

Environment influeces a lot of aspects of our everyday life: to protect our health we have to breathe the fresh air, drink fresh water and avoid contamination with harmful wastes, not to be subjected to the influece of the excesive noise and vibration.    Meanwhile the human’s activity itself causes considerable damage to the environment – air, water, soil, flora, fauna, natural resources ans finally the human itself as an integral part of the environment.

Within the last two decades the significant changes in the mentality and attitude of the society to the environment happened.    The result of the efforts of world society on prevention and control of environmental contamination, implementation of the nature-conservative measures, use of ecologically clean tehnologies is the acceptance in 1992 at the UNO conference in Rio de Janeiro of the Environmental Declaration.  In 1993 International Organization for Standardization ISO created the Technical committee TK 207 “environmental managenet”, for the purpose of developing of the System of standards for environmental management. The important result of the activity of the TK207 is the acceptance in 1996 of five standards in the ISO 14000 series, containing composition and description of elements of the environmental management system, guidance for use and guidance for ecological audit.

In 2004 International Organization for Standardization ISO reviewed the standards in the ISO 14000 series. As a result in 2006 in Ukraine the National standards were implemented:

• DSTU ISO 14001:2006 Environmental management systems. Requirements and guidance for use (ISO14001:2004, IDT) – to substitute DSTU ISO 14001-97;
• DSTU ISO 14004: 2006 Environmental management systems. General guidelines on principles, systems and support techniques (ISO 14004:2004, IDT) - to substitute DSTU ISO 14004-97.

International standards in the ISO 14000 series

• ISO 14001:2004 Environmental management systems. Requirements and guidance for use.
• ISO 14004:2004 Environmental management systems. General guidelines on principles, systems and support techniques.
• ISO 14015:2001 Environmental management. Environmental assessment of sites and organizations.
• ISO 14020:2000 Environmental labels and declarations. General pronciples.
• ISO 14021:1999 Environmental labels and declarations. Self-declared environmental claims (Type ІІ environmental labelling)
• ISO 14024:1999 Environmental labels and declarations. Type І environmental labelling. Principles and procedures
• ISO/TR 14025:2006 Environmental labels and declarations. Type IIІ environmental labelling.
• ISO 14031:1999 Environmental management. Guidelines on assessment of environmental characteristics.
• ISO/TR 14032:1999 Environmental management. Examples of assessment of environmental characteristics.
• ISO 14040:1997 Environmental management. Life cycle assessment. Principles and framework.
• ISO 14041:1998 Environmental management. Life cycle assessment. Goal and scope definition and inventory analysis
• ISO/TS 14048:2002 Environmental management. Life cycle assessment. LCA Data documention format
• ISO/TR 14049:2000 Environmental management. Life cycle assessment. Examples of ISO 14041 standard application for goal and scope definition and inventory analysis.
• ISO 14050:2002 Environmental management. Vocabularly.
• ISO/TR 14062:2002 Guidelines for integrating of environmental aspects into product development.

Many of these standards were accepted in Ukraine as identical National standards (DSTU).

By implementing environmental management system each organization has to determine the legislative and other regulating requirements to the environment that has to be fulfilled and which are applied to the environmental aspects of its activity, products or servises.

Compliance of the organization with the legislative and normative acts is one of the most important criteria of audits during certification of environmental management system.