Barriers to adoption of ISO 14001 environmental management system by the Nigerian construction industry

Abstract

Construction industry is considered among the resource exhaustive and environmentally damaging industry. The industry has been making effort to improve its environmental practices using ISO 14001 (EMS). It is a standard which offers the potential for organizations; especially construction firms the opportunity to organize their structure and activities to work in a manner that is environmentally friendly. Previous studies show that Nigeria has revised the law and policy for environmental protection yet not much has changed. This study aimed at identifying barriers to the adoption of ISO EMS by the Nigerian Construction companies and to determine which barriers predicted certification with the hope of improving adoption in Nigerian. The study took both qualitative and quantitative approach. The quantitative method was used for data collection by questionnaire survey. The qualitative approach explored annual reports, related literature from journals, and magazines. 200 questionnaires were distributed but 120 were returned for the analysis; a response rate of 60%. Reliability statistics of barrier factors revealed a Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.765 at 95% confidence level, giving a high internal consistency indicating that the result of the survey was reliable. Some of the identified barriers include level of commitment by top management, the difficulty of identifying environmental aspects, formulating EMS policy, certification procedure, high cost of training company personnel, difficulty of accessing, cost of policy formulation, difficulty in meeting legal requirement, implementation of environmental law and policy, and the level of awareness. Moreover, analysis has also shown that the most important barriers to be tackled in order to get EMS certification in Nigeria include constituting the EMS team, awareness on EMS, lack of guidance on EMS, and high cost of implementation. Respondents also recommended that the process of certification should be simplified to encourage more new certifications and the EMS certification should also be made as a pre-condition to get a new contract as part of incentives to the EMS certified companies.