This is an article published by TURKAK, the Turkish national accreditation body member of EA.

Sustainable development is defined as ensuring the present economic development without ignoring the needs of future generations.

The United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action to eradicate the poverty, protect our planet, and ensure that all people live in peace and prosperity. These goals consist of 17 interrelated goals and aim at solving the problems facing humanity.

One of them is ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’. This global purpose has the following targets:

  • Implementation of the 10‑Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns,
  • Effective use of natural resources,
  • Reduction of food waste and losses,
  • Responsible management of chemical wastes, reduction of waste generation through e.g. recycling, integrating sustainable knowledge and practices into reporting cycles of the companies,
  • Dissemination of scientific technological production methods,
  • Sustainable public procurement,
  • Supporting a life in harmony with nature,
  • Developing countries’ orientation towards more sustainable production and consumption, sustainable tourism,
  • Elimination of harmful incentives that have negative effects on the environment and making them more efficient- in humanity’s sight.

In the world we live in, the natural resources that human beings use to meet their production and consumption needs are limited. At the same time, the world population is increasing. In addition to these, we have been faced with a covid-19 pandemic that has greatly changed our consumption habits for the last 16 months. With the advancement of technology, products are under much more intense scrutiny as consumers are now more inclined to weigh the features of the products. In such an environment, it is necessary to ensure the smooth continuation of commercial life, while at the same time protecting public health and the economic interests of consumers. Moreover, in order to achieve sustainable development, we need to consume sparingly, responsibly, without harming the nature, and reduce our ecological footprint by changing the way we produce.

We can define the concept of ecological footprint as a method developed to calculate the ecosystem balances that are deteriorated as a result of human activities and to determine the amount that needs to be returned to the ecosystem. We can also reconcile this concept with the concept of ‘entropy’ in thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is considered one of the most fundamental laws in the universe and is also known as ‘entropy’. In short, we can perceive a transition from regular to disordered as decay, and the entropy is increasing gradually.

Fortunately, there are ‘standards’ for designing our processes. Standards take their place in our lives as technical criteria that include the methods, processes and practices put forward by the representatives of the parties they represent, such as manufacturers, sellers, buyers, customers, trade associations, users or regulatory authorities, who are competent in their fields and know their needs.

Accreditation may be defined as a quality infrastructure created to support the reliability and validity of conformity confirmation certificates issued for works performed according to internationally accepted standards by conformity assessment bodies.

Carrying out the consistent processes in accordance with the good practice examples through accredited conformity assessment, has the potential to keep malfunctions and disruptions to a minimum, control costs and encourage innovation, and guide manufacturers. It also assures consumers by maintaining consistently high standards in the quality of products and services.

In this regard, accreditation serves a “Responsible Consumption and Production” sustainable development goal as well as all other global goals of the UN, in terms of prevention and mitigation of the negative environmental impacts, controlling of the design, manufacturing, distribution, consumption and disposal of products and services, from production to processing, from storage to distribution and consumption at all stages of food safety and the production of the food using natural substances and processes which have a limited environmental impacts etc. through the accreditation of the schemes such as “Environmental Management Systems” and “Food Safety Management Systems”.

We have science, we have accepted methods, so we have hope, and the most important, we still have time. Accreditation strongly supports the UN’s global goal of ‘Responsible Consumption and Production!

 

Omer Karavelioglu
Corporate Communications Manager, TURKAK