PT Sucofindo to issue ISO 14001 certificates

JAKARTA (JP): State-owned surveying company PT Sucofindo has agreed to cooperate with the Japan Audit and Certification Organization for Environment (JACO) to issue ISO 14001 certificates on environmental management in Indonesia.

Sucofindo's president, Sutrisno, said in a seminar here yesterday that the company expected to obtain a license in the near future from the National Standardization Board to issue the certificates.

ISO 14001 was introduced by the International Standardization Organization (ISO) last September as a standard for the environmental management system (EMS) of companies.

"We chose a Japanese partner in the certification service because we want to serve Indonesian companies, particularly those jointly established with Japanese partners," Sutrisno said, adding that there were around 300 Indonesian-Japanese joint ventures in the country.

He also said his company preferred to cooperate with JACO because the organization was a major certification organization in Japan, which had issued 58 ISO 14001 certificates or about 60 percent of the 92 certificates already issued in Japan as of last October.

According to Sutrisno, there were now four domestic companies which had accepted ISO 14001 certificates from foreign certification firms.

P.L. Coutrier, deputy chief of the Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedal), said yesterday that there were 45 other companies waiting for ISO 14001 certification. (13)