The Effects of Environmental Management Systems on the Environmental and Economic Performance of Facilities

Do environmental management systems (EMSs) work? Do they provide value for the companies that undertake the considerable costs and efforts to create them? Since 1996, a partnership among federal and state governments, academia, and the private sector has set out to compile “high-quality, comparable data” on EMSs to determine how they “affect the environmental and economic performance of a range of private, federal, and municipal facilities. This 2000 update surveys 50 participating facilities about their environmental management systems and includes two case studies of EMS design and implementation.