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Self-Regulation By Environmental Management System

© Kenneth Friedman

I've spent a lot of time discussing the International Standards Organization's ISO 14000 environmental standard in particular, including the Environmental Management System (EMS). The idea of ISO 14000 is to get a group of industries to apply the same environmental standards to their business practice no matter what country they are in. One business motivation for applying ISO 14000 is to avoid getting shut out of the market place if "ISO companies" use 14000 to set up a trade barrier. In other words, a company that has been certified as an ISO 14000 company could refuse to buy products and services from companies that are not ISO 14000 certified. Because this would be an industry-imposed trade barrier, quite a few large international companies are looking into certification so they could advertise themselves as certified.

One part of the ISO approach to achieving equality in environmental practice is to use the EMS to cause critical self-investigation, from start to finish, of processes, products and services. But this self-investigation implies and includes self-regulation, which is or is sure to be controversial for a number of reasons.

1. Cheating #1. No one can convince me that people won't cheat somehow. It could be on definitions of which aspects of a company's products, processes or services constitute a potential environmental problem, on the proposed effectiveness of a solution to a problem, on the timeliness of correcting a problem, on the identified potential environmental impact, and more.

2. Substitution of self-regulation for government regulation. No one can convince me that self-regulation should replace government regulation. Without the watchfulness of government agencies, laws and regulations, fines and other penalties, abuse would become rampant. This applies to countries where there are already strong environmental laws. In countries where there are weak laws and weak enforcement, or none at all, substituting and relying on self-regulation rather than establishing firm regulations would be foolish.

3. Variation in certifiers. ISO certification is supposed to be granted only by independent, trained, accredited (certified) ISO-certifiers whose credibility ideally depends on maintaining independence, honesty and quality. At this point, I have questions about who certifies the certifiers. In the United States alone, we've got disreputable doctors, lawyers, judges, government officials and any other category you can think of who are under some form of self-regulation or agency regulation, and we still have a mess. Are we supposed to be confident that some self-controlled certifying authority knows what it is doing? I don't think so. By the way, the industry being certified pays for the certifier, not that this could ever influence anybody.

4. Cultural Perception. It is a no-brainer to say that different countries (cultures) have different perceptions - ways of looking at things.