Enterprises To Implement Iso14001 Environmental Management System Performance Evaluation

ISO 14001, an international EMS standard, in line with the plan,do,check and act model, is widely adopted by a variety of organizations since 1996. There have been 40970 organizations certified as conforming to the standard by a third party "registrar"by June 2002 according to the report of ISO World.During the process of implementing ISO 14001-based EMS, many companies have realized that an EMS has the potential to improve a company in many ways not only help it comply with environmental regulations, but also bring it all kinds of benefits. Up to now there has been little systematic research on how ISO 14001-based EMS affects the environmental, economic and managemental performance of companies.Based on literature reviews and several practical cases study, it is found that some important problems should be solved, which include building a performance evaluation index system, designing a model for information collection, choosing a comprehensive assessment method and analyzing the trend of performance changes. So in this paper, a performance evaluation model of implementing EMS for companies has been established, which includes three main parts.(1) Performance evaluation index system, including benefit indicators and cost indicators, benefit indicators consist of environmental-economic benefits and managemental benefits, while cost indicators include costs paid during the processes of adoption and implement of EMS;(2)Investigation questionnaire, helping companies collect the information in a1SO14001standardized manner;(3) Comprehensive assessment method, including benefits-costs analysis and method of fuzzy and comprehensive assessment.The paper has made a careful study on 12 companies from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai three provinces, which have implemented EMS for more than half a year. Among these 1 2 companies, a detailed case study has been made on one of them, namely TH Company.Through analysis and assessment towards them, the following conclusions have been reached:(1) The performance evaluation model is systematic, appropriate and pratical;(2) Within one year after the EMS implementation, most of the benefits-costs analysisresults from 12 companies are negative. One year later, the results changes, with some of them become positive others still negative.The Bdls through fuzzy and comprehensive assessment are above 0.5, which indicate the EMS implementation has effect on improving local environment quality and the companies' management skills.(3) the importance of environmental management in a company, the appropriateness of EMS designed, the completeness of EPIs and the existence of an evaluation mechanism for environmental performance are the four factors influencing the performance.