Environmental Management Systems | Report

Running head: ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Environmental Management Systems
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1ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Title: Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the International Environmental Guidelines
and Standards
Introduction
Environmental management system (EMS) has been the concern for governments and
environmentalists for decades now (Oliveira et al. 2017; Lewandowska 2011). Due to the
extensive nature of production in different industries and their substantial impact on the
environment begs the issue of management severely (Daddi et al. 2016; Collins et al. 2016).
There are numerous products and by-products that are produced to support human lifestyle
(Notarnicola et al. 2017; Collins et al. 2016). All of these activities are using resources from
the environment. In most cases it has been seen that the production procedure remains largely
unsupervised which creates negative impact on the environment (Hanandeh 2015; Leung and
Yang 2012). In this regard, the use of Life-cycle Assessment is widely popular. Scientists
believed that the use of alternative energy resources, recycling and reusing would be able to
mitigate the environmental risks while, further researches show that even the process of
renewable energy resource causes damage to the environment (Nguyen et al. 2014; Cary and
Roberts 2011). The researches show that many production practices, including wind energy,
agriculture, industries follow ISO standards for the mitigation of environmental risks.
Research Hypothesis
These researches lead on to the following hypothesis: the adoption and use of
International Environmental guidelines and standards effectively help in mitigating the
environmental impact in different production sector.

2ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Discussion
Notarnicola et al. (2017), argues that sustainable growth and consumption of
food can be achieved through Life-Cycle management. Researches also concentrate on the
ISO 14001 produces several guidelines for managing the environmental impacts of food
production. Food production is one of the basic requirements of human civilization and is
practiced extensively in all the countries. During the production of the food, several
chemicals are used in order to secure the harvest as well as increase the growth of the
production. These chemicals have hazardous effect on the environmental elements including,
soil, water and air. Agricultural procedures and by-product creation releases harmful
substances like phosphate. Farmers, in some cases follow regulations and filtration methods
to reduce the impacts of those effluents. In spite of that it has been seen that they are likely to
choose the economic factors over the environmental factors, if given a choice (Oliveira et al.
2017). Thus, the risks that grow from the diffusion of agricultural effluents remain high. The
international standards that have been proposed have rarely been followed. The reason behind
this is the economic drawback and lack of governmental support in case of crop destruction.
In the developed countries food production requires wide use of machineries that
causes air pollution. The farmers mostly use on-farm measures for the mitigation of the
environmental risks. On closer inspection, it was found that these measures are generally
cost-effective or cost-neutral, thus proving the point that economic viability is a strong
indicator for farmer’s uptake of any mitigation measure (Lewandowska 2011). Their choice
and practice of mitigation measure are also influenced by technological adaptability rather
than their actual effectiveness. This clearly indicates that the Life-cycle Assessment criteria
suggested by the international guidelines are inadequate and not cost-effective. This is the
reason why they are not adopted by the farmers on a larger scale. The improvement that ISO
needs is technological as well as on the basis of economic and social viability (Daddi et al.