Compatibility

ISO has no plans to merge ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 14001:2004 and at the same time is sensitive to the needs of users who wish to implement both quality and environmental management systems.

Therefore, the ISO technical committees ISO/TC 176 (responsible for ISO 9000) and ISO/TC 207 (responsible for ISO 14000) have an ongoing collaboration to achieve a high degree of compatibility between the two families of standards to facilitate their implementation by user, either as side-by-side systems, or as integrated management systems.

This collaboration addresses such issues as common terminology and structure of the standards and its biggest achievement so far is the development of a joint auditing standard for quality and environmental management systems: ISO 19011:2002, Guidelines for quality and/or environmental management systems auditing