Rankings

Company rankings are a powerful way of using greater transparency in corporate environmental performance to influence management decisions. Rankings of firms across three core environmental performance indicators are presented here for five MEPI sectors (book and magazine printing, electricity generation, fertiliser production, pulp and paper manufacture and textile finishing).

All rankings of performance must be treated with caution. A lower rank does not necessarily indicate poor environmental management. It may be explained by the technological, market or regulatory constraints the firm operates within. For example, its products may require a particularly energy-intensive production process.

In addition, two methodological problems may limit the reliability of results:

Use of normalisation factors: In some sectors, insufficient data was available to normalise environmental effects on production output (e.g. tonnes of paper produced). Instead, less reliable normalisation factors were used (e.g. company turnover or number of employees).
The eco-efficiency of a company is calculated as the average performance of all years for which data was available. This procedure provides a larger data set for the analysis. On the other hand, it might introduce a certain bias because different time periods are compared for different companies. This seems justified because the data shows that year-to-year variations of one firm tend to be smaller than differences between companies.

It should also be noted that companies included in the rankings are leaders in the field of corporate environmental reporting. Poor reporters who are not included may also turn out to be relatively poor performers. Firms designated with a code rather than the company name provided data under the precondition of anonymity.