Developing a practical set of environmental sustainability metrics

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There is a lot of talk these days about environmental sustainability, global warming, carbon footprints and green house gas. An off shoot of all these “new” environmental issues is the desire to measure them through indices or metrics. In fact, a huge cottage industry has sprung up on developing, refining and re-defining these environmental indices and metrics.

In this paper Norman Wei suggests that the environmental aspects of a company’s operation should be used as practical indices or metrics for its environmental sustainability. Once all the activities have been clearly defined within the operations and have been assigned an overall environmental risk value (metric) to each one, the final result should be either a table or chart showing which specific activities the company should focus in on to reduce the environmental risk and improve its sustainability.