Industrial Environmental Performance Metrics Challenges and Opportunities (1999) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
9 Observations, Trends, and Challenges
9 Observations, Trends, and Challenges
Pages 151-168
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PART }~} Current Status and Future Directions
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companies have made significant progress over the past three decades in the development and application of environmental metrics. These metrics have proved instrumental in both documenting and driving progress toward environmental performance goals.
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identify three general drivers for setting industrial environmental performance goals and developing associated metrics: · the need to comply with regulatory mandates, · the desire to achieve or strengthen competitive advantage, and · the desire to improve corporate stewardship practices and reputation. Effectively managing the environmental aspects of a major manufacturing operation with respect to all three drivers requires a broad range of metrics and a commitment to acquire what can sometimes be very specialized data.
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German magazine publishers recently began to demand paper bleached by total-chlorine-free processes, while McDonalds and the U.S. government require specific levels of postconsumer recycled material in the paper products they buy.
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Another less quantitative ranking is Fortune magazine's list of "America's Most Admired Companies" (Robinson et al., 1998~. This survey rates companies based on responses from over 10,000 top executives, outside directors, and securities analysts.
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TRENDS The current trend in industry is toward greater public disclosure of information about waste generation and pollutant release (KPMG, 1997~. While these and most other industrial environmental performance measures are responses to government reporting requirements, the committee finds evidence that some companies are beginning to move beyond compliance to report metrics associated with ecoefficiency.
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At present, larger corporations are much more likely to investigate, develop, and use measures of environmental performance (Ehrenfeld and Howard, 1996; KPMG Denmark, 1997~. While larger companies have been at the forefront of implementing environmental metrics, in some industries the portion of the product life cycle under the direct influence of the firm contributes only a fraction of the overall environmental impact.
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Other hurdles commonly present when implementing any new initiative, such as overcoming organizational inertia and developing corporate buy-in, will likewise need to be addressed if improved metrics are to realize their full potential. While most of these industry-specific challenges will be dealt with by individual firms or facilities, the committee has identified a number of broader obstacles to the development and widespread use of improved industrial environmental metrics.
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Similarly, the health impacts of toxic air emissions in an urban area are quite different from the same releases occurring in unpopulated locations. Currently, environmental metrics do not reflect these differences.
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Through explicit requests for environmental performance information (and possibly through preferential contracting arrangements with firms that have better environmental measurement practices) , some large firms and government procurement programs have encouraged suppliers to track and communicate environmental metrics.
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If such actions are to become more commonplace, however, suppliers will need much clearer definitions of what constitutes superior environmental performance. At the other end of the life cycle, there are still relatively few environmental metrics describing the use and final disposition of products.
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Environmental metrics, however, are typically recorded in a hodgepodge of dissimilar units: pounds of hazardous wastes, parts per million of a chemical, number of oil spills, kilowatt-hours of electricity, and so on. The multiplicity of environmental metrics has led several companies and other stakeholders to propose weighting schemes useful for scoring across diverse dimensions of performance.
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With the click of a button, users of the site can rank these emissions by relative carcinogenicity, a quick means of weighting emissions of widely varying hazards. Normalization is another issue that arises with virtually all environmental metrics.
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Several state and federal agencies are experimenting with alternative regulatory approaches for firms that pledge to improve and demonstrate their environmental stewardship. In addition, a full spectrum of organi zations, community groups, and others is analyzing the utility of existing environmental metrics.
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As with many emerging issues, sustainability creates new challenges for which existing environmental metrics fall short. Just as the shift from pollution control to ecoefficiency is forcing new definitions and measures of environmental performance, greater interest in climate change, ecosystem health, and sustainability are leading companies and their stakeholders to search for new yardsticks to track progress.
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Paper presented at National Academy of Engineering International Conference on Industrial Environmental Performance Metrics, November 1-4, 1998, Irvine, Calif. Chouinard, Y., and M.S.
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1997. Green metrics: A status report on standardized corporate environmental reporting.
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