When developing the scope of the EMS, key components to consider are:
The scope as stated on the ISO 14001 certificate will be succinct and comprise one or two sentences. Organisations can demonstrate their understanding of the scope by identifying aspects, establishing actions and objectives, and developing operational control and influence.
“Scope of the EMS includes the organization's functions, physical boundaries, and its activities, products and services to which ISO 14001 requirements will apply. It is common practice to consider the items described in the bullet points when establishing scope statements.”
Source: https://committee.iso.org
Contents
Your Scope should include:
that have or can have significant environmental aspects, or to evade compliance obligations.
The degree of control needs to be determined for the environmental aspects associated with such things as procured goods and services, outsourced processes, product performance requirements, and end of life treatment (recycling, disposal, etc.).
Top management should accurately set the scope of your environmental management system as per the ISO 14001 requirements.
Your organization has the freedom and flexibility to define its boundaries and the limitations of the scope, as long as the Top management team have authority to establish an environmental management system.
Internal and external issues and interested parties’ needs and expectations provide guidance on what an organisation may decide to include in the scope.
For example, an organisation may decide to include certain facilities in its scope due to expectations from an interested party, or to extend its scope to cover previously excluded products due to an external issue regarding greater environmental scrutiny.
Compliance obligations are an important consideration as they can impose the level of control your organisation has to exert, which will consequently impact the content of system’s scope.
A good example of this relates to waste law, where the producer often retains responsibility for its waste until it is finally treated or disposed of.
The scope of your organisation’s environmental management system should be made available to interested parties either in an unrestricted manner, for example online or in the reception area at each physical location.
We recommend the Scope be available as a PDF download (easily distributed on your website or by email) along with a copy of your ISO 14001 Certificate.
Scope and all of the ISO 14001 clauses are fully-documented and explained in our Environmental Management System Template (EMS).
We have procedures, templates, checklists, process maps, forms and gap analysis tools to help your documentation without missing a single input or output.
Before you invest all the hours reinventing the wheel, before you spend countless dollars outsourcing the task — try our templates.
Updated: 26th February 2022
Author: Richard Keen
Richard is our Compliance Director, responsible for content & product development.
But most importantly he is ISO's biggest fanboy and a true evangelist of the standards.
Learn more about Richard
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Instead of trying to create everything you need to follow this process from scratch, use ours. We have procedures, templates, checklists, process maps, forms and gap analysis tools to help your documentation without missing a single input or output.
Before you invest all the hours reinventing the wheel, before you spend countless dollars outsourcing the task — try our templates.
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