By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO, Apr 1 1997 (IPS)

Environmentalists are berating a new global standard adopted by companies that want to assure customers of their quality environmental practices.

Ford Motors and the Sony Corporation recently announced they had adopted ISO 14001, which was launched Sep. 1, 1996 by the Geneva-based International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). They are among the dozen or so businesses in the United States that have taken on the new code.

To be certified under ISO 14001, a company must identify the major environmental impacts of activities carried out at its facilities and set procedures and goals for improving these practices. The procedures are fully documented, and the goals should meet the minimum national legal standards. All employees must be trained to follow the new procedures, and outside auditors are required to check for compliance.

But a growing number of environmentalists say the standard is woefully inadequate and could easily be abused, since the company is not compelled to publish the outside audits. And if the company were to lie about environmental problems, the ISO has no enforcement system.

“Where’s the beef?” asks Jerry Speir, director of the Tulane Institute for Environmental Law and Policy in New Orleans. “How do these systems assure results? Where is the enforcement?”

For ISO, which has traditionally set quality control benchmarks for wide-ranging areas, including film sensitivity, the height of car bumpers, and the size of screws, the new standard allows it to participate in the rapidly expanding industry of environmental management.

But critics say it is possible for a company with gas emissions 100 times the existing national standards to promise to meet government mandated levels within a decade and get an ISO 14001 certificate. This could lead to some confusion when a rival company that is in compliance with the law qualifies for the same certificate.

The Washington-based Global Forestry Policy Project, a joint effort of Friends of the Earth, the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club, is uncomfortable with ISO 14001.

“The jury is still out,” says the Project’s Bill Mankin. “We feel somewhat nervous about the whole ISO system. It leaves a lot of flexibility and leeway for the companies to do what they want and still get certified.”

In the case of Sony, the electronics giant says that its facilities are in full compliance with all U.S. government regulations. “Our name is our most valuable asset,” says Mark Small, the environmental director of Sony electronics, North America. “We will not risk that.”

But Small agrees that the system is not perfect.

“Yes, it would be possible for another company with a bad record to get the same certificate,” he says. “Any label can be deceitful. How do you regulate dishonesty?”

Josephine Histand, environmental engineer at Ford’s electronics facility in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, says Ford’s adoption of ISO 14001 has resulted in some improvements in company practices.

“We have had to document everything that we do, creating a paper trail for the auditors. All our staff have had to undergo training which has helped raise their consciousness,” she says.

But environmentalists insist that in the absence of an enforcement mechanism, violations of the system could take years to be discovered.

Pierre Hauselmann, a consultant with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Geneva, the environmentalist who participated the most in the international negotiations for the creation of the standard, says that ISO is out of its depth.

“The Environment is a completely new field for the ISO, and the procedures that were adequate for technical matters are proving to be insufficient to deal with environmental issues and their stakeholders,” says Hauselmann who insists that ISO has created a race to the bottom by adopting the weakest possible standard.

The Canadian Standards Association (CSA), which designed the system for the 50-year old ISO, defends the new standard.

“Technically, it’s true that people could abuse the system, but I don’t subscribe to the idea that companies will do this,” Achmed Husseini of the CSA told IPS. “It’s very far-fetched, and market forces will not allow them to do this.”

Husseini does agree that the ISO 14001 is less stringent than similar national standards like the British BS 7750 or the European Union EMAS standard but points out that many countries have no standards at all.

“What we have achieved is a global standard,” he says. “Britain has withdrawn its system and so has Canada. But now, you can compare any company in the world with any other.”

Hauselmann says he plans to create a network of environmentalists around the world to monitor all companies that file claims under ISO 14001 to make sure that they are not abusing the system.

“ISO work on environmental management has the potential to be misused and misrepresented in that it can give the impression to consumers that companies are making real efforts toward environmental improvement without this necessarily being the case,” he says.

He notes that consumers need to look for other more scientific and rigorous labels of environmental standards such as the Forest Stewardship Council label that certifies logging companies.

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