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ENVIRONMENTAL BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking is a relatively young management tool, developed in the United States at the beginning of the 1980s. Generally speaking, benchmarking refers to the process an enterprise undertakes in order to identify, understand and adapt itself to best practices, whether its own or those of another organisation, with the final goal being that of improving performance. The process is developed within the context of a thoroughgoing comparison with the enterprise's competitors and thus is a useful tool for reinforcing the competitiveness of the company.

Some organisations have recently begun to look towards the application of benchmarking techniques in the environmental sector. The elaboration of these benchmarking tools is generally used by organisations within a particular sector or by industrial districts in order to identify, analyse, adapt and share the practices that are available to the sector or, in the best of cases, those already in operation.

As adapted to environmental management, the objectives of benchmarking are directed toward:

• improving the environmental performance of a company or sector and thus its relations with external subjects;

•setting objectives for new performances;

• contributing to and accelerating the changes in environmental factors;

• improving production, management and human resources processes;

• facilitating the competitiveness of the enterprises in the areas of environment,
energy, health-safety, system quality and the product;

• providing support for investment decisions;

• exploiting information already available to the enterprise as the result of
existing legislative obligations;

• permitting the continued improvement of the performance of an enterprise or a
business sector.

In fact, one of the first examples of environmental benchmarking in Italy was its application to the industrial ceramics sector in Emilia-Romagna through the initiative of Assopiastrelle: each business associate receives an "Integrated Benchmarking Bulletin" that makes it possible to individualise its 'position' in terms of environmental, energetic, health-safety, system quality and product quality performance in relation to the mean average performance of the enterprises in the sector.