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Implementing Life Cycle Perspective in EMS

This document provides guidance on how to implement and document the "life cycle perspective" requirement of ISO 14001:2015. It explains that the life cycle perspective aims to influence environmental performance beyond an organization's own operations by influencing suppliers and customers. The first step is to identify areas where an organization can influence third parties. As an example, a table is shown documenting the life cycle issues and improvement suggestions for a concrete producer, with headings for environmental effects and rows for raw material and product issues. The document notes that organizations have flexibility in how they document the life cycle perspective.

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Susheel Wankhede
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6 views2 pages

Implementing Life Cycle Perspective in EMS

This document provides guidance on how to implement and document the "life cycle perspective" requirement of ISO 14001:2015. It explains that the life cycle perspective aims to influence environmental performance beyond an organization's own operations by influencing suppliers and customers. The first step is to identify areas where an organization can influence third parties. As an example, a table is shown documenting the life cycle issues and improvement suggestions for a concrete producer, with headings for environmental effects and rows for raw material and product issues. The document notes that organizations have flexibility in how they document the life cycle perspective.

Uploaded by

Susheel Wankhede
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

How to implement "life cycle perspective"

Thursday, 30th March 2017, 2:09 PM

In February last year, I wrote an article on the “life cycle perspective” required by ISO
14001:2015. In this follow-up article, I will suggest how you might implement and document
this life cycle requirement in your EMS.

The purpose of life cycle perspective is to influence environmental performance beyond the
organisation’s own operations by influencing third parties such as suppliers and customers.

The life cycle perspective will cover different issues in different businesses. For a
manufacturer, the emphasis might be on raw materials and use of its products by customers.
For a service company, the life cycle might be focus on the influence it can have on customer
behaviour and decisions.

So the first step in implementation of life cycle perspective is to identify where your
organisation might have influence with third parties. This influence may be direct or, for
example, via choosing suppliers with good environmental credentials.

As an example of how consideration of life cycle perspective might be documented, the table
below has been compiled for a concrete producer. The column headings reflect
environmental effects/benefits and the rows highlight the main life cycle issues (in this case
raw materials and product issues). The lower half of the table lists improvement suggestions
– these might later be selected in EMS objectives. (The row and column headings will be
different for other businesses.)

 
 

This is simply one way that the life cycle perspective may be documented, and 14001:2015
offers flexibility in doing this any way you [Link] table doesn’t include the organisation’s
own activities – these will be covered in the Environmental Aspects Register. It may be
useful to also incorporate the information from the table into this register

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