Environmental Aspect vs Impact
An aspect is the element of your activities, products, or services that interacts with the environment; an impact is the environmental change it causes. Aspect: diesel generator use. Impacts: air emissions, greenhouse gases, fuel consumption.
The cause-and-effect chain
ISO 14001 clause 6.1.2 requires you to identify aspects, determine their impacts, and — using criteria you define — decide which aspects are significant. Significant aspects become the targets of your operational controls, monitoring, and objectives. The chain: activity → aspect → impact → significance → control.
The analysis must span normal, abnormal, and emergency conditions (the spill, not just the storage) and take a life cycle perspective — upstream (what your suppliers do) and downstream (use and end-of-life of your product), to the extent you can control or influence it.
Worked examples
Vehicle fleet operation (aspect: fuel combustion → impacts: CO₂ and NOx emissions, resource depletion). Parts washing (aspect: solvent use and disposal → impacts: VOC emissions, potential soil/water contamination). Office IT procurement (aspect: electronics purchasing → impacts: upstream resource extraction, downstream e-waste). Packaging design (aspect: material selection → impact: recyclability or landfill at end-of-life — a life-cycle aspect you influence rather than control).
Typical significance criteria: legal exposure, severity and scale of impact, probability, duration/reversibility, and stakeholder concern — scored simply and applied consistently. Auditors care less about your scoring formula than about whether the obviously-significant things scored significant.
Go deeper, free.
Every standard this term appears in has a free clause-by-clause guide on ReadSafety.com — and when you're ready for certification, USQC provides accredited third-party audits.
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