Is the Swedish Environmental Goods and Services Industry Green? : Product and production perspectives

Sammanfattning: In most business sectors environmental programs focus on direct, production-related environmental impacts. The design and development of products with reduced environmental impact is considered more difficult. The opposite applies in the environmental technology sector. The business model of environmental technology companies focuses on delivering solutions that contribute to improving the environmental performance of their customers. Products and services delivered by this sector have prominent environmental profiles. However, companies in this sector may not necessarily set and implement environmental goals for their own activities and manufacturing processes, and may not clearly distinguish between production and product related environmental aspects.This thesis presents results of an online survey of environmental technology companies listed by the Swedish Environmental Technology Council (Swentec). The survey found that depending on the subsector, only between 21% and 45% of companies provide information about their environmental work on their website.Environmental impacts of a company may be product and/or production related. The survey found that these dimensions are treated differently, and are not always clearly differentiated in environmental tools and guidelines, such as the ISO 14000 series, the Reporting Guidelines for UK Business, the GRI and The Swedish Annual Accounts (ÅRL). There are also differences in the ways that information about production and product related environmental impacts are considered within the environmental technology industry. Some companies clearly distinguish between product and activity related environmental issues, while others are unclear about the distinction between their products and their activities in environmental policies and management. While some companies in the sector limit the environmental information they disseminate to the environmental benefits of their products, others explicitly articulate that the predominantly product related environmental profiles in the sector drive them to additionally minimise environmental impacts of their own activities.This thesis proposes environmental aspects of products and production as bases for corporate environmental profiles, corporate greening, and for defining ‘green’ and ‘green-green’ business, and concludes that companies within the environmental industry should be expected to be green-green business. This thesis concludes that companies within the environmental technology sector should increase their use of both production and product related environmental profile information in their presentations on their own websites and at platforms such as Swentec. Furthermore, the thesis shows that the use of the term ‘process’ within environmental technology sector to describe both the companies’ own operations and their products can create ambiguities in understanding. Companies that deliver ‘processes’ as products should avoid ambiguity by describing their own operations with terms such as ‘production processes’, ‘production’, ‘manufacturing process’, ‘operation’ or ‘activity’.