Within the United States, organizations from both the public and private sectors have put the ISO 14000 family of standards into action to monitor their continued environmental performance. As the coordinator of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) offers interested stakeholders a number of ways to get engaged and demonstrate their commitment to this important family of standards.
U.S. constituents interested in contributing their expertise and opinions to ISO 14000 standards are encouraged to participate on the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO Technical Committee (TC) 207, the committee that develops ISO 14000 documents. The U.S. TAG is responsible for developing and carrying U.S. positions forward to the committee. Interested parties can contact Jennifer Admussen ([email protected]) of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), the ANSI-accredited U.S. TAG administrator to TC 207.
Those interested in obtaining documents from the ISO 14000 family can purchase and download individual standards or two convenient pre-packaged collections from webstore.ansi.org.
ISO 14000 collections are also available through an ANSI site license. Networking site licenses for intra-company use of customized collections of standards allow companies to disseminate standards information to multiple users at one or more locations. For more information on ANSI's site license offerings, contact Mark Brown ([email protected]; 212-642-4935).
Organizations wishing to become accredited ISO 14001 management system certification bodies can do so through the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB), a joint partnership of ANSI and ASQ. ANAB granted 43 such accreditations by year-end 2009.
ANSI also accredits validation and/or verification bodies (V/VBs) to two standards in the ISO 14000 family through its Greenhouse Gas Accreditation Program. The program, which assesses V/VBs against the requirements defined in the international standards ISO 14065:2007, Greenhouse gases - Requirements for greenhouse gas validation and verification bodies for use in accreditation or other forms of recognition, and ISO 14064-3:2006, Greenhouse gases - Specification with guidance for the validation and verification of greenhouse gas assertions, granted 13 accreditations by year-end 2009.
Whether stakeholders are interested in developing, purchasing, or being accredited to ISO 14000 standards, ANSI offers a number of ways for its constituents to become involved. For more information on the new brochure, see ISO's news release.