ABSTRACT
Many companies benchmark their own policies and reports against competitors and industry leaders. This chapter presents a methodology for doing so quickly and systematically. A methodology for evaluating voluntary public environmental reporting is crucial to the development of a new paradigm of public-private partnership towards sustainable industrial development. The greatest opportunity for improvement exists in the integration of the more social aspects of sustainable development. Tools are needed to evaluate beyond-compliance environmental management, and benchmarking against indicators for sustainable industrial development will be extremely useful. A benchmark tool of corporate policies and reports has value for corporate practitioners or potential practitioners. Firms without public policies and reports, or those that wish to benchmark and improve their public materials, can see what leading practice is and make choices for their own company policies and reporting. Voluntary 'beyond-compliance' corporate environmental management is a dynamic new field that could offer a foundation for a new public-private performance-based partnership.
