Industrial Environmental Performance Metrics Challenges and Opportunities (1999) / Chapter Skim
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12 A Framework for Action
12 A Framework for Action
Pages 199-216
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PART IV Conclusions and Recommendations
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Limiting future regulatory actions will require skillfully harnessing performance improvements with both environmental and economic benefits while formulating innovative strategies to efficiently address environmental concerns that lack obvious connections to the bottom line. The committee is convinced that environmental performance metrics will play an important role in these efforts, providing a valuable tool to industry as it strives to do its part to lower human impacts on the environment.
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Therefore, before suggesting ways of improving the current set of metrics, the committee wishes to provide some guidance to those organizations that have yet to establish a comprehensive framework of environmental metrics. RECOMMENDATION 1: Companies should investigate and implement to the greatest degree practicable environmental metrics representative of current best practices.
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NOTE: In many cases the usefulness of metrics will be enhanced by appropriate normalization (e.g., per unit product, per unit sales, per product use, per product lifetime)
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GOALS FOR IMPROVING INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE To assist industry improve its stewardship of the environment, the committee has identified five goals and associated recommendations for enhancing the development and use of industrial environmental performance metrics: · adopt quantitative environmental goals, · improve methods of ranking and prioritizing environmental impacts, · improve the comparability and standardization of metrics, · expand the development and use of metrics, and · develop metrics that keep pace with new understanding of sustainability. In pursuing these goals, both government and the private sector have important roles to play.
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on which to focus throughout the sometimes convoluted political process. They also provide industry with a greater degree of certainty about the future regulatory environment, which is an asset to corporate planning activities.
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Individual companies and industry sectors should take the initiative in setting, tracking, and reporting on their progress in meeting quantitative environmental performance goals. The committee observes that while broad statements of policy such as those found in a corporate mission statement can provide some direction, they are often insufficient to catalyze continual and substantive environmental improvement.
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This process should begin by focusing on human health risks and extend to issues of ecosystem health and long-term sustainability as knowledge and understanding of environmental systems evolve. Present knowledge may not allow for explicit numerical scoring of all impacts under all circumstances, but the committee feels that sufficient knowledge does exist to begin to prioritize categories of environmental loads (e.g., air emissions, water emissions, resource use, land use)
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A program along the lines of the EPA Office of Compliance's sector notebook project, organized by EPA and involving experts from industry, academia, and public stakeholder groups, could begin to rank the environmental loads of greatest concern in various industrial sectors. Goal 3: Improve the Comparability or Standardization of Metrics If environmental metrics are to become broadly useful across companies, industrial sectors, the investment community, and countries, great strides must be made in standardization.
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The committee is convinced that developing a set of standard metrics is absolutely critical to establishing a pattern of continual improvement in industrial environmental stewardship. While government participation is prudent in any process that seeks to set national standards, industry should play an integral role in the development, implementation, and promotion of standardized environmental performance metrics.
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The 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change provides a superb opportunity to test the international community' s ability to develop standardized environmental metrics. Goal 4: Expand the Development and Use of Metrics The four industry studies in this report reveal that some companies, primarily large manufacturers, have made great strides in measuring and improving their environmental performance.
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RECOMMENDATION 7: Industry should integrate environmental performance metrics more fully throughout the product life cycle. Few companies or industries control their product from cradle to grave, and many exercise direct influence over only a fraction of product life cycle.
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Some system needs to be devised that more effectively communicates these techniques to small and medium-sized companies as well as to larger companies that have yet to develop environmental measures. The Internet allows for the creation of a widely accessible clearinghouse of environmental metrics information.
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While many companies have made headway in the application of ecoefficiency metrics and programs, this represent only a first step toward sustainability. As society begins to come to grips with the theoretical and technical underpinnings of sustainable development, companies will be challenged to maintain the pace of improved performance as they seek to evaluate their activities against an often changing set of criteria.
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Examples might include assessment of the implications of continued heavy dependence on landfills for hazardous and nonhazardous solid waste disposal and the resulting adverse environmental impacts on a local, regional, national, or global scale. While the concept of sustainable development has widespread appeal, there is as yet no scientific consensus on a definition of the concept or indices by which it may be measured at the macro, or societal, level.
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Although industry should play an active role, the long-term and exploratory nature of much of this research makes it more practical that nongovernmental organizations, government researchers, and the academic community take the lead in pursuing methods of quantifying these complex and interrelated aspects of sustainability. As world population continues to rise and the Earth's carrying capacity becomes increasingly strained, sustainability issues will begin to directly impact industries and companies.
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Much work remains, but as society works to achieve a pattern of sustainable development, environmental metrics will provide a valuable tool for influencing environmental decision making and driving .
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