The Pressed Standard is a national dry cleaning and laundry organisation with 50 shops. You are conducting an EMS surveillance audit of the Head Office and are sampling environmental performance measurement.
You find that 80 per cent of failures to meet performance criteria originate from five shops in the same region.
Most of these failures relate to the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that exceeded regulations.
The Environmental Manager tells you that these are the oldest shops in the organisation. The cleaning equipment needs replacing, but the organisation cannot afford it at the moment.
On raising the matter with senior management, you are told that there are plans to replace the equipment in these shops over the next five years.
When reviewing the nonconformity report files, you find that the organisation is facing a legal dispute with the environmental authority over multiple breaches of environmental legislation.
Select the three best options for how this should be handled by the organisation through its EMS.

• A. Give an explanation to the authority of what went wrong.
• B. Advise the authority that timely corrective action will be taken.
• C. Conduct an internal enquiry to establish who is to blame.
• D. Offer to compensate employees for possible health implications.
• E. Investigate changing the cleaning process to use chemicals with lower VOC content.
• F. Monitor VOC emissions to ensure compliance with legal requirements.
• G. Advise the authority that the faulty equipment will be maintained more often.
• H. Ask to settle the court case by negotiation with the authority.

Considering the requirements of clauses 6.1.2 and 6.1.4 of ISO 14001:2015, put the actions in the correct order to complete a process/task.

You have been nominated as audit team leader for the second recertification to ISO 14001 of ABC, a public transport organisation in a big city. The audit is planned to take place in two months.
The audit program manager asks you to review the answer provided by ABC to a nonconformity raised by another auditor during the last surveillance audit carried out eight months ago.
The nonconformity reads as follows:
*"ABC does not always communicate its relevant environmental requirements to external providers.
Evidence: A two-month contract signed with a new external provider of the maintenance for ABC's buses did not contain any relevant environmental requirements."* Which two would you consider to be the best corrective actions from ABC?

• A. We will discuss the issue during the next management review.
• B. We asked the EMS to include this issue in the next internal audit.
• C. We identified environmental aspects related to the external provider's activities.
• D. We retrained procurement personnel on the ISO 14001 requirements.
• E. We revised the contract to add the relevant environmental requirements.
• F. We revised the procurement process.

A huge public library established an EMS following the requirements of ISO 14001, which was third-party certified 10 years ago. You are performing the second surveillance audit of the third certification cycle. The audit plan included an audit to the Director as the last interview before the closing meeting.
During the interview with the Director, you audit clause 6.2 (Objectives and planning to achieve them). The dialogue is as follows:
You: Could you please tell me which were the environmental objectives defined for last year and show evidence of their achievement?
Director: Yes. We had defined three objectives. As you can see from our Annual Plan, one of them was to separate our waste in four categories: paper, plastics, metals, food - before, we had only three (plastic and paper were disposed together). We developed an Action Plan to achieve this objective.
Which six of the questions would you ask related to the Action Plan?

• A. How was progress of the plan being monitored?
• B. Who was responsible for the completion of the plan?
• C. Did you define any method for monitoring progress?
• D. When is its completion date?
• E. How will you evaluate the cost savings?
• F. How did you measure it?
• G. Is it consistent with the environmental policy?
• H. Was it approved by the Director?
• I. Did you estimate what resources would you need?
• J. Were actions integrated into the organisation ' s business processes?