Environmental management has become an important issue within companies.
Despite being a lot of environmental tools that companies may use, there is not a
model that guides them towards environmental excellence and makes them see
which tool they should use according to their maturity stage. This research
hypothesizes that successful corporate environmental management evolves
through a series of characteristic stages; independent of industrial context.
The research literature in this type of models is scarce, without going into a
deep analysis of how environmental management evolves within industrial
companies, and hence, not being helpful within companies.
As a consequence, the main objective of this research is to define an
evolutionary environmental management maturity model. For the development of
this model an iterative process has been followed, starting with some semistructured
interviews among 19 companies within the Basque Country and two
day workshops with environmental experts. As a result of these methods, the first
version of the EMM (Environmental Management Maturity) Model has been
developed. This version has been improved with the results obtained from a survey
carried out within Spanish and Italian companies, leading to the second version of
the model. Afterwards the development process was moved to the UK, obtaining some important information through a survey and semi-structured interviews. The
third and final version of the EMM Model was completed.
The EMM Model proposes six maturity stages: Legal Requirements,
Responsibility Assignment and Training, Systematization, ECO2, Eco-Innovative
Products and Services and Leading Green Company. For each maturity stage a
description, the people involved, the different policies, indicators, Causal Loop
Diagrams and Behavior Over Time graphs have been defined.
It can be concluded that the maturity stages and consequently the different
parts of each of the stages in this research can provide valuable guidance for
industrial firms aiming to make progress in environmental matters, as the EMM
Model helps them to identify in which maturity stage they are and sets out steps
that they can take to move forward