Strategy for steering environmental work within SCA

The aim of this strategy is to show how to work with a company’s environmental policy and create usable indicators in order to be able to steer the environmental work towards the goal of the policy. The strategy is based on experiences from the CPM project IMPRESS , where SCA Personal Care, which is one of the business areas of SCA, took active part.

This strategy aims at supporting the extraction and definition of environmental condition indicators from the environmental policy. This is a step in a methodology that started to develop in the CPM project “Policy controlled environmental management work”. After the finalisation of that project, the extraction step needed some further development to be performed in practice, which is an important part of the management of environmental information. Hence, the IMPRESS sub-project “Environmental management at site and group level” was started to continue this work.

In that project the focus has been on creating indicators that fulfil the environmental policy of a company. Indicators can be of different types, named in different ways and by different organisations. An example is the indicators found in the ISO 14031 standard. The indicators addressed by ISO 14031 are to be used when evaluating the environmental performance of organisations, but in the RAVEL project¹ it was found that the indicators also can be used to evaluate environmental performance of e.g. product or process systems as well².

A pre-requisite for using this strategy is that the company has an environmental policy and an
ambition to improve the handling of the environmental information and the possibilities to steer the environmental work of the company. The primary target group is persons working with environmental information management, e.g. environmental coordinators and people working in environmental departments.
 

¹ Ander, A., Deflou, J., Dewulf, W., et al, Integrating Eco-efficiency in Rail Vehicle Design, Leuven University Press, 2001

² Carlson, R., Environmental Performance Indicators, Industrial Environmental Informatics, Chalmers University of Technology, Published July 2002 Issue of Insight

Working procedure