The complicated part about an EMS (and ISO 14,000 for that matter) is the way the guidelines are written. The first problem is that the writing seems to have been done by a lot of engineers. These are people who complicate everything they write; only lawyers and government employees are worse. Engineers, for example, can't resist adding "ize" to as many words as possible: utilize, functionalize, externalize, downsize and so on. They're the ones who utilize a spoon to stir coffee; the rest of us just use a spoon or the writing end of a ballpoint pen.
Second, if it wasn't bad enough that a bunch of engineers did the writing, they had to come from different countries. In the end, some of what they wrote doesn't translate into American English without interpretation of the writers' intent. So the fun part occurs when Americans try to figure out what the Europeans wrote. Since engineers have been taught to follow rules, they mostly interpret things literally, whether it makes sense or not. Then they wander around saying "what does this mean?" Is Dilbert the only one who "gets it"?
Here's an example of the interpretation problem. The ISO people decided that one important concept in an EMS would be an "environmental aspect." ISO wrote that an aspect was "an element of an organization's activities, products or services that can interact with the environment." The problem is, nobody in their right mind uses the expression "environmental aspect." What the heck is an aspect? Since ISO's definition called it "an element" (read the second sentence at the beginning of this paragraph again), why didn't ISO just refer to an "environmental element"? Probably because then ISO would have had to have defined it as "an aspect of an organization's activities . . . ." For some reason, probably because of lawyers, ISO decided against defining environmental aspect as being a cause or causal factor, but that's just what it is: something that causes or could cause something to happen to the environment.
If you still don't understand what environmental aspect means, think of it this way. If you took a ride above your company's plant in a helicopter, you could look down at the plant (unless you get airsick like me) and ponder to yourself, "now, what aspects of our operations could have an effect
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