Abstract:
Climate change and environmental pollution is known as a major problem in the
worldwide. Sri Lankan companies provide considerable contribution to environmental
pollution. The most impact spring up due to industrial operations in Sri Lanka. As major
economical contributor to the Sri Lankan economy, apparel industry can be known as a
major environmental polluter. To prevent and control the environmental pollution the ISO
14001 certification system is identified as the best solution. However, in Sri Lanka, among
the BOI registered apparel company, only 9 percent of apparel companies implemented
ISO 14001 EMS. It seems that some obstacles is affected to implementation of ISO 14001
certification. Hence this study is focused on the find significant existing obstacles that
affecting to the implementation of ISO 14001 certification system in BOI registered
apparel companies. According to this aim, the researcher formed two main research
question (what is the level of awareness of apparel companies about ISO 14001 EMS and
why do apparel companies not implement to ISO 14001 EMS) and objectives (to
investigate awareness of the apparel companies on ISO 14001 EMS and to examine the
obstacles that faced by apparel companies for implementing ISO 14001). Hence BOI
registered apparel industries is selected as population and sample size is 158 through
random sampling techniques. Descriptive statistics is used as data analyze method.
According to the findings of the study, the most significant internal obstacle is the cost of
changing the system and most significant external obstacle is the lack of government
support and guidance for the implementation of ISO 14001 certification
