EMM Model. Environmental Management Maturity Model for Industrial Companies

Abstract

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.