Abstract
Industry has long been one of the most important drivers of Chinese economic growth. In order to improve the environmental footprint of industrial areas, Chinese authorities have established mechanisms of environmental control in the internal management processes of companies. In this regard, the international standard ISO 14001 for environmental management systems is the management tool that has had widest adoption among Chinese companies since its creation in 1996. The main purposes of the paper are to investigate the available international and national statistics on the adoptionof ISO 14001 in China, and present opinions on ISO 14001 of the 72 representatives of small and medium enterprises and multinational companies of Guangdong province that participated to the workshop “New tools and standards to advance and measure corporate sustainability”, held in Guangzhou on 26 January 2018. The analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) was adopted as the research method to collect opinions on the ISO 14001 standard. Participants were asked to discuss strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities considering four business aspects: sustainability, internal processes, stakeholder engagement, and resource management. Our findings indicate that companies fully embraced ISO 14001 and recognized the necessity of a standardized approach to identify environmental aspects. On the other hand, they also expressed concern about aspects such as the certification cost, the focus on certification itself and not on the improvement of environmental performance, and the lack of integration with sustainability tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and other sustainability paradigms such as circular economy and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Highlights
The past few decades have witnessed the rapid development of China, which has developed as the second economy in the world
The purpose of this study was to analyze the opinion of a group of small and medium companies (SMEs) and multinational companies (MNCs) of Guangdong province in China about the voluntary standard International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, whose aim is to set out the criteria for an effective environmental management systems (EMSs)
Our results indicate that Chinese companies fully embrace ISO 14001 and recognize the necessity of a standardized approach to identify environmental aspects
Summary
The past few decades have witnessed the rapid development of China, which has developed as the second economy in the world. China’s environmental policy has undertaken great changes in the past few decades, presenting four features: the increasing importance of becoming one of the basic state policies; the change from a single administrative measure to an integrated approach of legal, economic, technological administrative measure; the emphasis on the coordination of environmental protection and economic development; and the shift from end-of-pipe treatment to the whole process control of industry. The number of firms that have obtained ISO 14001 certification has increased threefold, reaching the number of 346,189 certificates in 175 countries by the end of 2016 [51] The purpose of this standard is to provide organizations of any type with a systematic framework which leads to [33]: prevention and mitigation of adverse environmental impacts; mitigation of potential adverse effect of environmental conditions on the organization; fulfillment of local legal obligations; enhanced environmental, financial and operational performance; and sound environmental communication to relevant stakeholders. For comprehensive reviews on diffusion, determinants, benefits and difficulties in implementation see Nishitani [67], Salim et al [49], Boiral et al [23] and Lim and Prakash [68]
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