Environmental Management
Aspect versus impact
The distinction drives most of this domain. For ISO 14001, an environmental aspect is an element of an organization's activities, products, or services that interacts with the environment - for example, solvent use or fuel storage. An environmental impact is the resulting change to the environment - VOC emissions, groundwater contamination. Significant aspects drive objectives, operational controls, and monitoring.
ISO 14001 follows Plan-Do-Check-Act: environmental policy, identification of aspects and compliance obligations, objectives, operational controls, monitoring and measurement, internal audit, and management review. Critically, it prescribes no numeric performance level. A question asking what emission limit ISO 14001 requires has no such answer.
Regulatory cornerstones. Clean Air Act; Clean Water Act with NPDES permits and stormwater SWPPP; RCRA cradle-to-grave hazardous waste with generator categories; CERCLA release reporting against reportable quantities; EPCRA and TRI reporting; SPCC plans for oil storage.
Pollution prevention hierarchy: source reduction, reuse, recycling, treatment, disposal. Distractors place recycling above source reduction.
Traps. Confusing aspect with impact; assuming a permit limit is produced by the management system; forgetting that management of change can create a new significant aspect.
Worked example. A facility switches to a new degreaser. The correct first step is to identify and evaluate the new aspect and its significance, then update controls, objectives, and monitoring accordingly. Training operators before that evaluation is a common but incomplete answer.