ISO standards are not laws. However, ISO standards are stricter than regulatory requirements. They also expressly require companies to comply with all applicable laws. So you'd expect ISO companies to have exemplary compliance records. But do they?

How ISO Certification Affects Compliance

Surprisingly, the evidence to support the link between ISO certification and a company's compliance with regulatory requirement is thin.

In one of the few studies to address the question, researchers surveyed 843 UK facilities regulated under the British Integrated Pollution Control program. They found an association between having an Environmental Management System (EMS) certified by ISO (or registered under the European Union Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS)) and higher levels of procedural performance for recording and use of information, plant maintenance and training. But the level of incidents, complaints and non-compliance events at the ISO/EMAS facilities wasn't substantially different from the levels at the non-ISO/EMAS facilities. The amount of enforcement activity directed against both groups of facilities was also roughly the same (Dahlström and Skea).

The 2003 UNC study mentioned in last week's piece also attempts a systematic study of the impact of ISO certification on a company's regulatory compliance. Rather than comparing ISO and non-ISO companies, the UNC researchers evaluated the performance of ISO companies before and after they attained certification. On the whole, they found "no statistical difference" between the number of observed violations and only a marginal difference in fines between the pre- and post-certification periods. "There is substantial evidence to suggest that the introduction of an EMS had little effect on regulatory compliance at the facility level," the study concludes.

The good news is that the UNC and other studies have perceived differences in attitudes at companies that have adopted an EMS. Such attitudes heighten awareness and are likely ultimately to translate to improved regulatory compliance. But they represent a form of soft and squishy, rather than hard evidence of performance improvement.

Conclusion

More than 35,000 companies worldwide have voluntarily adopted an EMS that's certified by ISO or an equivalent agency. There are four principle motivations for doing this:

• To improve corporate image and reputation;
• To improve financial performance;
• To improve environmental performance; and
• To ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Are companies actually achieving these results? Instinctively, you'd think that they are. Unfortunately, we still lack the concrete data to definitively prove that adopting an ISO-certified EMS immediately and directly makes a company more profitable, cleaner or more compliant. Unless and until studies demonstrating the link between the EMS and performance emerge, EHS coordinators will have a harder time building a business case for an EMS.

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