scope:

This American National Standard presents requirements for a quality management system for environmental programs.

A national consensus standard for quality systems for environmental programs involving environmental data and technology has been shown to be a valuable instrument to verify and help to improve the suitability and effectiveness of quality control and quality assurance practices applied to environmental programs. The environmental community has been forced in the past to use several different standards and frequently has required duplicate quality assurance (QA) functions and documentation on the same project or task to satisfy different customers requirements.

This American National Standard is intended to provide a minimum set of requirements to enable organizations to plan, implement, and assess the suitability and effectiveness of a quality system to support environmental programs involving environmental data and technology. It provides definitions of relevant terms and general principles necessary for any quality management system.

Recognizing the diversity of scope of environmental programs and the breadth of the field of application, this standard also provides non-mandatory guidelines in an annex to enable users of the standard to extend quality beyond the minimum requirements.