Are manufacturing companies improving their sustainable value added?

Abstract

The intensity and variety of societal and economic activities is increasing in number and causing different kinds of harmful effects on ecosystems and all their components. The methods evaluating these mostly negative effects on the environment (i.e. methods valuing negative externalities) by valuing the capital of a specific companies are known as burden-based methods. The value-oriented method known as sustainable value added takes into account the value created by all the resources used in a company. In this article we present the results of an analysis of sustainable value added created by ten European companies in the manufacturing sector with regard to seven different environmental resources. We compare the value created in the respective companies in 2003 and in 2010 to the target values. Our results show that companies now perform better than in 2003 though some of them cannot be described as sustainable when considering EU targets as benchmark values.