ABSTRACT
The reasons for extending the scope of environmental management more widely than the site boundary include: • an organisation’s environmental footprint is wider than its immediate
operations and includes the indirect environmental aspects and impacts associated with, for example, the use of supplier and contractor transport, product use and recovery/disposal, and other supply chain factors
• the main life cycle environmental impacts of a product may not be under the direct operational control of the organisation, but at another stage – upstream (eg in terms of suppliers) and/or downstream (eg in terms of customer use or disposal), as explained in the chapter on life cycle assessment (Chapter 2.4). ‘Life cycle thinking’ helps to address this issue
• the ISO 14001 standard requires an organisation to identify the environmental aspects of its activities, products and services that it can control and those that it can influence, and to ensure that the aspects related to significant impacts are considered in setting its environmental objectives
• ensuring that suppliers and contractors are managing their operations responsibly helps to reduce the risk of disrupted supplies and any consequent commercial impact on the organisation
• extending environmental management to cover a wider scope of activities can be considered to be part of continual improvement of the EMS (see also Chapter 2.1).
