ABSTRACT
As economies of industrialized nations become increasingly service-oriented, more attention to the environmental impacts of providing such services is warranted. In the United States, roughly 60% of the 1997 gross domestic product (GDP) is associated with the service sectors, which excludes manufacturing, mining, agriculture, forestry and fishing, government services, electric, gas, sanitary services, and transportation (USCB 2001a). With transportation, government, electric, gas, and sanitary services added, this fraction jumps to 80%. Traditional manufacturing companies are developing a substantial presence in the service sector, such as the financing, information technology, and real estate subsidiaries of automobile companies, and new service domains are emerging, such as e-commerce. Environmental engineering and policy has tended to focus on processes with a high concentration of pollution as measured by emissions to different media, or quantity of emissions per unit of production. Service industries have tended to be ignored for environmental policy because of their relatively low emissions at their point of generation. In addition, services often lack a well-defined unit of production, so it is difficult to assess their relative performance over time or between companies.
