Grantee Research Project Results
2002 Progress Report: Environmental Management Systems: Do Formalized Management Systems Produce Superior Performance?
EPA Grant Number: R829440Title: Environmental Management Systems: Do Formalized Management Systems Produce Superior Performance?
Investigators: Andrews, Richard N. , Amaral, Deborah
Current Investigators: Andrews, Richard N.
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: November 19, 2001 through November 18, 2003 (Extended to May 14, 2005)
Project Period Covered by this Report: November 19, 2001 through November 18, 2002
Project Amount: $340,000
RFA: Decision-Making and Valuation for Environmental Policy (2001) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Environmental Justice
Objective:
Many major businesses recently have mandated the introduction of environmental management systems (EMSs) by their subsidiaries and suppliers, and government agencies also have begun to promote such systems with public recognition and incentives. Two key unanswered questions are: What differences in actual environmental performance are associated with the introduction of such systems? Do such systems produce positive changes in performance and other benefits when they are mandated or encouraged by external incentives?
The objective of this research project is to determine what similarities and differences in environmental performance result from the implementation of EMSs, and what differences in organizational characteristics, motivations, and decision-making are associated with these differences. Specifically, we seek to determine whether there are systematic differences in EMSs themselves and in resulting environmental performance, between businesses that adopt EMSs for their own organizational reasons ("self-initiated"), or with government assistance or other incentives, or under coercion from enforcement actions or corporate or customer mandates. Both public policymakers and businesses themselves will benefit from better information on the consequences of EMSs for environmental performance, and on their associated benefits and costs.
Progress Summary:
As anticipated, most of Year 1 was devoted to identifying key sectors and developing a sampling design for facilities for study, designing and pretesting the survey instrument, and determining the availability and quality of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) environmental performance data sets for subsequent linked comparisons. We also have nearly completed development of a database for the data we are about to collect; completed a research bibliography of more than 200 journal articles, reports, and other empirical studies on EMSs; and completed an additional year of longitudinal data collection on the National Database on Environmental Management Systems (NDEMS) pilot facilities to investigate changes in EMSs and related environmental performance over time.
We now have completed the design of the survey instrument and identified specific contact information for a sample of 3,709 U.S. manufacturing facilities to which it is ready to be sent, in four Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) subsectors: Metal Coatings and Allied Services (3479), Chemical Preparations (2899), Motor Vehicle Parts and Accessories (3714), and Plastics Products (3089). These sectors were chosen to include a high number of certified environmental management systems, strong supplier relationships to the automotive sector (which has mandated supplier EMSs), and significant environmental impacts based on EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data. The sample includes facilities that have adopted EMSs with and without external pressures or incentives to do so, as well as controls that have not adopted formal EMSs at all. The survey will be sent to plant managers, with the request that it be completed either by the plant manager or by another knowledgeable senior manager. We have pretested the survey in four manufacturing facilities similar to those we are targeting, and it has been refined with the assistance of survey research experts in the University of North Carolina's Odum Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and approved by the University's Institutional Review Board for human subjects research.
The survey is designed to collect data regarding four main characteristics: (1) the presence of environmental management activities and motivation for adopting them; (2) the objectives of those activities; (3) performance change in the past 3 years, including environmental performance measures as well as costs and benefits of EMS activities; and (4) characteristics of the facility, including number of employees, involvement in the automobile industry, and status as a privately held or publicly traded business.
In a closely related though separately funded project, we have just completed the final report of the NDEMS Pilot Program (PP), which provides a foundation for many of the design considerations and propositions we are testing in the current study. Among other conclusions, the NDEMS/PP project-based on longitudinal data for 83 facilities in 20 sectors-found that the introduction of an EMS can be expected to be at least somewhat beneficial to the environmental performance of most facilities, as well as to their operating and management efficiencies, and in some cases to their regulatory compliance patterns. These results were more likely for facilities that were subsidiaries of publicly traded corporations, owing to their greater access to management capabilities, resources, and assistance from their parent organizations, but they occurred in privately held and government facilities as well. We also found that facilities that anticipated business benefits from EMS adoption-marketing potential, competitive advantage, increased revenues, or support of other professionals-showed significantly higher aggregate scores for improvement in their environmental performance indicators than others. The report is listed below, and is available on our Web Site. The current project is designed both to extend this pilot investigation to a far larger statistical sample of facilities, and to investigate more systematically the similarities and differences between pilot-program volunteers and facilities that adopt environmental management practices under positive or negative incentives.
Future Activities:
During the second year of this research project, we will send out the survey, follow-up twice to nonresponding facilities, and code, quality check, and enter the responses received into the database. We also will collect and link the relevant environmental performance data from EPA's IDEAS and TRI databases, and begin analyses of the results. Finally, we plan to conduct telephone follow-up interviews with a smaller subsample of high-change facilities, as proposed. The processes of instrument design and sample selection took somewhat longer than we had initially anticipated, owing in part to changes in data availability from one of the principal databases we had intended to use for sample selection, but that now has been resolved through the use of an alternative and more comprehensive database. The project is now moving forward essentially as proposed. We anticipate requesting a no-cost extension of the project period for a third year to complete the analyses and prepare, present, and publish papers based on the results, to extract the full value from the data we now are ready to collect, and we have budgeted accordingly.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 14 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
risk management, pollution prevention, public policy, socioeconomic, social science, ISO 14000, Multi-State Working Group, MSWG, supplemental environmental projects, cleaner production/pollution prevention, enforcement impact, environmental compliance, environmental decision-making, environmental impact comparison, environmental management systems, EMS, environmental performance, environmental policy, government regulatory costs, policy analysis, policymaking, statistical methods, valuation, voluntary programs, business, industry, social science, voluntary agreements, green track., RFA, Economic, Social, & Behavioral Science Research Program, Scientific Discipline, Sustainable Industry/Business, cleaner production/pollution prevention, Sustainable Environment, Technology for Sustainable Environment, Economics and Business, Corporate Performance, decision-making, Environmental Statistics, New/Innovative technologies, Social Science, Economics & Decision Making, Market mechanisms, environmental performance, environmental management systems (EMS), policy analysis, voluntary regulations, environmental management systems, policy making, valuation, environmental decision making, risk management, decision making, environmental impact comparison, socioeconomics, environmental policy, government regulatory costs, environmental Compliance, EMS, enforcement impact, pollution prevention, social sciences, voluntary programsRelevant Websites:
http://ndems.cas.unc.edu/ Exit
Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.