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Problem Drivers and Indicators • 9

global agencies, mandates, and guidelines
ISO 14000

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the world’s
largest developer and publisher of international standards.
ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 162 coun-
tries, one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva,
Switzerland, that coordinates the system.
ISO is a nongovernmental organization that forms a bridge between the
public and private sectors.

ISO 14000, also known as the Global Green Standards, is a set of stan-
dards developed by the International Organization for Standardization.
It is essentially a family of standards including 14001:2004 and
14004:2004 that address the various aspects of environmental manage-
ment. As standards or guidelines, they provide a framework for com-
panies to work with to validate that either their processes are green or
they are in a concerted effort to make them green. According to the
International Organization of Standardization, “ISO 14001:2004 gives
the generic requirements for an environmental management system.”
Most environmental management systems (EMSs) are built on the age-
old plan-do-check-act cycle (see Figure 1.2). Built into that philosophy
is the principle that companies will continually improve their processes
with regard to environmental impacts. It doesn’t necessarily “certify”
that a company is green, only that the company is continually working
toward improving its greenality. The EMS includes all of the things we
talk about in this book—reduce/redesign, reuse, and recycle—to mini-
mize your environmentally impacting footprint, and, just as important,
to improve the efficiency of your project. In other words, as project man-
agers, we are continually trying to improve the efficiency of the resources
we are utilizing. ISO provides a formidable set of standards that a com-
pany needs to meet, similar in rigor to the ISO 9000 standards, which
are focused on quality. This link between quality and environmental
efficiency is a theme of our book. The ability to prove adherence to the
standards can qualify an organization for ISO 14000 certification after
an audit of their processes is conducted by an official certification body.
For further information and certification bodies by economy (county),
see http://www.iaf.nu/.