Using life cycle approaches to enhance the value of corporate environmental disclosures

Abstract

As the focus of environmental policy and management shifts from cleaner production at the process level towards greener products as a whole, stakeholders ask for transparency throughout the entire value chain. This article assesses the comprehensiveness and the value of currently reported quantitative environmental disclosures of 97 listed companies from the automotive, banking, pharmaceutical and electronic hardware sectors. Findings indicate that quantitative environmental disclosures have many limitations, including incompleteness and inconsistency regarding corporate activities and sites, and limited internal data coherence. For many sectors, corporate disclosures only cover a very small share of the total environmental burden of products. A stepwise procedure is proposed to verify and improve the quality and completeness of reporting using life cycle approaches. We present simple data quality tests, and we introduce the concept of the environmental infl uence matrix, which provides a solid basis for the identifi cation and prioritization of key performance indicators and areas of action.sustainability reports are one way to meet stakeholders' needs for corporate environmental information, and they provide evidence of corporate sustainability assessments. There are other sources such as environmental labels and product declarations (ISO 14020 series), life cycle assessments (ISO 14040 series), pollutant release and transfer registries (e.g. the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER)) and macro-evaluations of industry sectors (e.g. . While complementary, these sources are rarely combined, probably because of their different scopes (products versus company versus sector) and target groups. We suggest combining these approaches in a consistent evaluation framework to increase the quality and reliability of current corporate environmental evaluation and disclosure. This article addresses both stakeholders' interests in the quantitative evaluation of the corporate environmental performance and the interests of managers in new concepts and tools to improve environmental self-evaluation and company disclosure. The article proposes a stepwise procedure based on life cycle approaches to verify and improve the quality and comprehensiveness of quantitative corporate environmental disclosure. It illustrates the approach by analyzing the disclosures of large companies from four sectors and also shows how to improve it.

Práticas de disclosure econômico e socioambiental nas maiores empresas do Brasil

“…Essas discussões são geralmente fundamentadas em algumas abordagens teóricas, destacando-se a Teoria do Disclosure Voluntário, a Teoria da Sinalização e a Teoria da Legitimidade, tanto no contexto nacional (NOSSA, 2002;CALIXTO;MURCIA et al, 2008;FARIAS;RIBEIRO, 2009;MURCIA, 2010;SAMPAIO et al, 2010;BEUREN, 2012) ELY, 2008;SPENCE, 2009;KAENZIG et al, 2011). Nossa (2002, p. 15) salienta a importância da correta divulgação das práticas voltadas para a sociedade e o meio ambiente, ao recomendar que "além da ênfase dimensionada com a preservação e recuperação ambiental, as empresas devem estar aptas a informar aos seus stakeholders suas atividades e desempenhos ambientais".…”

<b>Implementing cleaner production in an automotive company: an application of material input per unit of service tool to measure environmental and economic advantages

“…The studies show the concern with rational use of water, implementing a closed cycle process (Sans et al, 1998;Kaenzig, Friot, Saadé, Margni, & Jolliet, 2011) to reduce water consumption in applications of thermal treatment and zinc phosphating processes (Alkayaa & Demirerb, 2013). In two of these cases, it was possible to minimize the use of chemical compounds to treat wastewaters from an effluent treatment station (Sans et al, 1998;Alkayaa & Demirerb, 2013), making it possible to manage the station's waste output by converting the sludge for clay manufacturing (Khan, 2008) or simply to pour wastewater without sludge into the sewage system, avoiding contamination (Alkayaa & Demirerb, 2013).…”

“…Moreover, automotive industries are reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Taylor, 2006) such as: CO 2 , CFC, particles and dust, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide (Kaenzig et al, 2011). To this end, a study measured the ecological costs to study the possibility of mitigating carbon gas emissions via carbon flow mapping, due to governmental pressures to cut down emissions (Lee, 2012), which are fostering the implementation of vehicle power train technology, including manufacturing of hybrid vehicles, bio-fuels, highlighting the Brazilian scenario of hydrogen energy (Zapata & Nieuwenhuis, 2010).…”

“…Another CP practice adopted focuses on controlling and reducing solid waste output (Orth, Baldin, & Zanotelli, 2014) and harmful chemicals (Taylor, 2006;Pandey & Brent, 2008;Kaenzig et al, 2011) such a, corrosive components from the manufacture of cleaning products (Khan, 2008).…”

“…Yet there is material waste and a lack of worker training on reducing actions and, especially, reuse actions by owners. On average, 74.17 tons of scrap are put out plus a huge quantity of corrugated cardboard and plastic waste output (Orth et al, 2014) -an aspect cited before as an opportunity to minimize package consumption by gauging the packages and reuse (Khan, 2008); besides reducing electric energy use on the production system by mapping the energy flow as well as to put in place recycling practices, reuse and remanufacture of polystyrene (Khan, 2008;Kaenzig et al, 2011;Lee, 2012), therefore increasing economic gains by reducing costs (reusing materials as input) and, environmental awareness, through conserving scarce resources (Xia, Govindan, & Zhu, 2015).…”