Before reading this article, make sure you've read my three previous articles on ISO 14000: Introduction to ISO 14000, Environmental Management Systems (EMS), Some problems with EMS.
In the article on "some problems," I explained the difficulty in understanding one of the terms used by the European authors of the ISO 14000 standard. I want to explain another transatlantic problem. This one has to do with an issue called "compliance" and you kinda have to understand the evolutionary history of ISO to understand why industry people in the United States have a hard time with this word.
If you read my introductory article, you understand that ISO was birthed by industry people from different European countries where there were different environmental laws and political wills to enforce them. Squabble, squabble. Europe really needs a voluntary standard so industries can compete equally as far as environmental economics are concerned. Indeed, the world can benefit from such a standard and it would be good for the environment.
But across the Atlantic, the colonies have--the Environmental Protection Agency. The colonists have strong central government regulation established by Congress (which has its own affect on global warming as a result of all the hot air it generates), and an agency to administer those regs. Without the feds, the states would be just like the European countries; they would have different laws and degrees of enforcement. In fact, they do. So with federal regulations and the EPA on hand, U.S. industries faced uniform "compliance issues" and have developed a "compliance mentality."
Today, many (maybe most or all) large industries (the ones government is more likely to go after rather than small ones) spend a good deal of time trying to "get into compliance." This means that if a regulation says you're allowed only 155 hippograms of emissions from your pipes, you'd better get your hippograms under control to "be in compliance" or you will be fined a lot of money. You'll want to shave your 2,361,487 hippograms down to 155. Exactly 155. Then you'll be in compliance. Shaving hippograms to 154 or 153 or 152 would be "going beyond compliance," and that's not something an industry wants to do.
Now, why wouldn't you want to "go beyond compliance"? You'd think that this would be a good public-spirited thing to do. It would get you lots of goody points with the public and "the agency." Nope. If you manage to cut below the compliance figure, the feds will lower the number like a limbo pole in Jamaica. The problem with lowering your hippograms
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