Survey Questionnaire on Environmental Management Practices: Summary of Results by Industry and Practices

Magali  Delmas; Michael W. Toffel

Report | 2008

Survey Questionnaire on Environmental Management Practices: Summary of Results by Industry and Practices

Abstract

This document provides a summary of the results of a survey on Environmental Management Practices (EMP) conducted by the University of California at Santa Barbara during October and November 2003. The survey was sent to 3255 facilities in 8 industrial sectors: pulp, paper and paperboard mills, chemical and allied products, refining, primary metals, machinery, electronics/electrical, automotive, and utilities. The survey yielded 562 responses, which constitutes a 17.2% response rate. This summary includes a general description of the sample, a profile of the respondents, and summary statistics of facilities' environmental management practices, relations with stakeholders, and environmental performance measures. In addition, we report the factors that respondents noted were influencing them to improve their environmental performance and adopt particular environmental management practices. In many cases, these results are categorized by industry to facilitate comparisons. The environmental management practices we inquired about include the adoption of an environmental policy and its communication, the number of internal and external audits performed at the facility, the proportion of employees in various departments receiving environmental training, "green purchasing" policies, the adoption of the ISO 14001 international standard, participation in industry and governments voluntary programs, and solicitation of opinions from environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Overall, we identified important differences between industrial sectors in terms of the level of adoption of these environmental management practices. Companies can employ these survey results to benchmark their practices to facilities in their own industry as well as to other industries. In addition, government, NGOs, and local communities can employ this information to learn the prevalence of different environmental management practices across various industries, and to better understand how firms are motivated—and influenced—to adopt environmental management practices.

Keywords: Economic Sectors; Surveys; Management Practices and Processes; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Government Relations; Environmental Sustainability; Non-Governmental Organizations;

Language: English

Format: Print

Read Now

Citation:

Delmas, Magali, and Michael W. Toffel. "Survey Questionnaire on Environmental Management Practices: Summary of Results by Industry and Practices." Report, 2008. (2008. University of California, Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research.)

We study how a regulator can best allocate its limited inspection resources. We direct our analysis to a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspection program that targeted dangerous establishments and allocated some inspections via random assignment. We find that inspections reduced serious injuries by an average of 9% over the following five years. We use new machine learning methods to estimate the effects of counterfactual targeting rules OSHA could have deployed. OSHA could have averted over twice as many injuries if its inspections had targeted the establishments where we predict inspections would avert the most injuries. The agency could have averted nearly as many additional injuries by targeting the establishments predicted to have the most injuries. Both of these targeting regimes would have generated over $1 billion in social value over the decade we examine. Our results demonstrate the promise, and limitations, of using machine learning to improve resource allocation. JEL Classifications: I18; L51; J38; J8.

Faculty & Research

Survey Questionnaire on Environmental Management Practices: Summary of Results by Industry and Practices

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author