The impact of implementation of ISO 14001 to residents in housing estates in Hong Kong

Abstract

Environmental protection is a hot issue around in the world. Many governments and industries have put a lot of resources and efforts to take their responsibility of environmental protection in their daily operation and to establish correspondence environmental management system in their field. One of the international standards - ISO 14001 is a standard to assist to monitor and standardize the environmental management system in a company. Many studies have reported that implementation of ISO 14001 can provide different advantages to the company, such as improvement of image, improvement of environmental performance, improvement of efficiency of environmental policies, etc.. However, in the point of view of environmental protection, the most important is the actions of a person. Environmental protection should be done by everyone in the world, but not just in a company or an industry. If the implementation of ISO 14001 can affect a person to become more environmental friendly, it is worth to the environment. Nevertheless, there are few studies to investigate the effects and impacts of implementation of ISO 14001 to a person, especially in the property management industry. Therefore, in this paper, the impacts of implementation of ISO 14001 to the residents in the property management industry had been studies qualitatively.

Three impacts, which are behaviors, awareness and knowledge of environmental protection, to the residents are investigated. The result found out that these are positively affected when ISO 14001 has been implemented in the properties. In conclusion, further research should be carried out to get an in-depth investigation as the sample size in this paper is limited and an absolute result cannot be got. However, the result is encouraging as implementation of ISO 14001 can positively affect the person living in the property and there are benefits to the environment due to their actions.