Abstract

Corporate environmental benchmarking is difficult with the range and inconsistency of environmental information available, even from facilities within the same firm. Environmental management systems can assist firms in organizing internal corporate benchmarking efforts. They attempt to capture environmental impacts from activities throughout a facility under a single system and generally follow traditional benchmarking cycles of plan, do, check, and act. However, the systems lack important features that enable benchmarking. Based on a critical analysis of environmental management systems, the article recommends minor changes to extend environmental management systems for corporate environmental benchmarking. Consistent goals should be encouraged at all facilities to produce common metrics. Procedures should require data collection and reporting to a central office. Management review should monitor performance and determine where leading facilities can transfer better processes to lagging facilities.

Environmental management systems (EMSs) are growing in popularity as tools to manage corporate environmental issues. Despite widespread use, existing frameworks for EMSs may not provide organizations with the knowledge needed for decision-making. Through a synthesis of case studies and workshops, we suggest five elements for EMSs to be expanded for organizational decision-making. The five elements are process diagrams, long-and shortterm goals linked to strategy, reliable information systems, risk assessment tools, and collaboration of environmental personnel across the organization. These five elements provide decision makers with relevant information linked to business strategy so that the organization can improve performance. The elements can be integrated with an existing EMS or used as a foundation for implementing one.

With 20% of US electricity used for lighting, energy efficient solid-state lighting technology could have significant benefits. While energy efficiency in use is important, the life cycle cost, energy and environmental impacts of light-emitting diode (LED) solid-state lighting could be reduced by reusing, remanufacturing or recycling components of the end products. Design decisions at this time for the nascent technology can reduce material and manufacturing burdens by considering the ease of disassembly, potential for remanufacturing, and recovery of parts and materials for reuse and recycling. We use teardowns of three commercial solid-state lighting products designed to fit in conventional Edison light bulb sockets to analyze potential end-of-life reuse strategies for solid-state lighting and recommend strategies for the industry. Current lamp designs would benefit from standardization of part connections to facilitate disassembly and remanufacturing of components, and fewer material types in structural pieces to maximize homogeneous materials recovery. The lighting industry should also start now to develop an effective product take-back system for collecting future end-of-life products.

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