Standards ensure sustainability
Standards contribute to sustainability by taking occupational health and safety and environmental protection into consideration: They offer experts tried and true solutions to technical questions of environmental protection, and facilitate regulation by providing uniform terminology, specifying substantive requirements, defining limit values, and laying down standardized methods of measurement.
Standards cover all aspects of air and water quality control, noise control and energy savings. The series of international standards on environmental management not only serves to ensure the environmental sustainability of industrial products and processes but also encourages environmental awareness among employees, thus helping businesses minimize the use of non-renewable resources, achieve legal stability, and meet customer demands.
The social aspects of sustainable development are also being dealt with in international standardization – see the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards of ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.