ISO 14001 for transport companies

A transport company sits inside its customer's supply chain. When a manufacturer or retailer accounts for its own environmental impact, your trucks, vans and depots are part of that picture. So the supplier questionnaire from the purchasing department contains a line on environmental management, and a field for the certificate number.

In tenders the same question appears as a selection criterion or as a document to attach to the quote. A certificate that the buyer can check on a verification page is quicker to assess than a policy paper. Customer audits ask for the same evidence in person.

Forwarders that book subcontracted carriers can pass the question on down the chain. A small haulier without a certificate then loses the booking before price is even discussed.

ISO 14001 starts with a plain inventory: where does your business use resources and where does it cause emissions or waste? For a transport company the answers are easy to find, because most of them sit in the workshop, at the fuel pump and on the road.

Fuel and energy use

Diesel consumed per vehicle group, charging of electric vans, heating and lighting of the depot and the warehouse.

Exhaust and noise

Engines idling at loading ramps, night deliveries in residential areas, vehicles of different emission classes in the same fleet.

Waste and operating materials

Used oil, filters, tyres, batteries, AdBlue and workshop rags, each with its own collection route and disposal record.

Water and soil

Vehicle washing, run-off from the yard, the area around the fuel tank and the parking places for loaded trailers.

Empty runs and route planning

Kilometres driven without load, low loading rates and detours that dispatching could avoid with better planning.

Environmental incidents

A leak while refuelling, a damaged tank on the road, a spill during loading of liquid goods.

The standard does not prescribe how much fuel you may use. It asks that you know your impacts, know your obligations and act on both. The table shows what that looks like in a transport company.

Most of the data you need already exists. It sits in fuel card statements, workshop records and the invoices of your waste collector.

1. 01

   List your sites and vehicle groups

   Depot, workshop, wash bay, fuel tank, vans, trucks, trailers. This is the scope of your environmental management system.

2. 02

   Collect the data you already have

   Fuel consumption per vehicle, waste quantities per type, any past incident notes. Do not start new measurements before you have used these.

3. 03

   Choose two or three objectives

   Pick the aspects with the largest impact or the largest saving. Planning belongs to clause 6 of the standard, and a short list is easier to follow than a long one.

4. 04

   Give each task an owner

   The dispatcher looks after route planning, the workshop foreman after waste and spills, the managing director after the policy and the yearly review.

5. 05

   Review the results in management

   Once a year, sit down with the figures and decide what to improve next. This is the performance evaluation and improvement part of the cycle (clauses 9 and 10).

You take the self-assessment online. It has 34 yes/no questions for ISO 14001. Fourteen of them are mandatory requirements of the standard and all must be answered yes. Of the other 20 questions, at least 14 must be yes. The assessment is free and you do not have to register.

Once you have passed and paid, the certificate arrives within 4 hours. It is issued by G6 Agency AG under licence from SICE, the Swiss Institute of Certification and Education, and SICE reviews every assessment before the certificate is issued. The PDF carries a QR code. Your customer scans it or enters the certificate number on the public verification page.

The price is CHF 699 (€699) in the first year, then CHF 469 (€469) per year including the yearly online re-audit. The certificate is valid for 3 years. Billing is an automatic yearly subscription that you can cancel at any time in your customer account, effective at the end of the current year. If you cancel, the certificate ends with the paid year. Customers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein pay 8.1% VAT, which is included in these prices. If you add a second or third standard, you get 20% off for two standards and 30% off for three or more, also on the yearly fee.

• Start the free self-assessment
• ISO 14001 at Zertify
• Prices and discounts

The classic route with an on-site audit by a certification body means appointments, auditors at your depot and a longer wait. The Zertify certificate rests on the online self-assessment, with no on-site audit, and is confirmed every year by a short online re-audit.

Some tenders name the route they accept. Read the wording in the tender documents or the supplier questionnaire before you decide, and ask the buyer if it is unclear. The guide on the routes sets them side by side.

• Compare the certification routes
• Certification without an on-site audit