Boeing achieves ISO 14001 environmental certification for all its major manufacturing facilities
(photo: Boeing)
Thu 19 Feb 2009 – As one of its prime environmental performance goals, Boeing has now achieved the internationally recognized ISO 14001 certification across all major manufacturing facilities in the US, Canada and Australia. The standard is for organizations wanting to implement or improve an environmental management system, which includes a set of processes, systems and practices to reduce environmental impact and to operate more effectively.
“As a responsible corporate citizen and neighbour, we are focused on reducing energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and waste at our facilities,” said Mary Armstrong, Boeing Vice President, Environment, Health and Safety. “Certification is a tremendous achievement by our employees.”
The independent certification audit was carried out by Det Norske Veritas (DNV), whose Director of Aviation, Space and Defense Services, Sidney Vianna, commented: “We recognized many areas of excellence at Boeing, from employee involvement programmes to recycling efforts, in one of the most aggressive ISO 14001 certification efforts we’ve seen.”
Introduced in July 2007, the achievement required coordinated, enterprise-wide efforts across 16 Boeing production facilities. “Getting all of our major manufacturing sites ISO 14001 certified by the end of 2008 was one of our primary environmental focus areas,” Aileen Yankowski, Boeing’s Compliance and Services Director for Environment, Health and Safety, told in-house magazine Boeing Frontiers.
At launch, reports the article, an enterprise-wide team was set up to define action items, create sub-teams and conduct regular coordination meetings to ensure integration, which led to the development of standardized templates and tools that sites could use to prepare for the audits. To support each facility’s quest for certification, team members worked with sites to help them undertake the 43 actions required.
“This was a huge effort and a terrific example of why functional management is so important,” said Armstrong. “Ensuring we were common and aligned across the whole company was key to meeting our aggressive commitment.”
Additional Boeing facilities are working towards earning their certifications during 2009.
During 2008, Boeing established targets to improve by 25% greenhouse gas emissions intensity, energy efficiency and recycling rates at its major manufacturing facilities by 2012, with a similar goal for hazardous waste reduction.
