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Environmental management in product chains

2 The empirical basis of the project

Four different consultancy firms carried out the 25 case studies for the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. The four consultancy firms are:

1. COWI
2. Dk-Teknik, Energi og Miljø in co-operation with DHI (Institut for vand og miljø) and Valør & Tinge
3. PlanMiljø
4. FORCE

The 25 cases have been published in an example collection and a short summary report:

• Bauer B. and Ettrup, B. 2002a, Environmental management in product chains (In Danish: Miljøledelse i produktkæder), Environmental Project no. 39, Danish Environmental Protection Agency

• Bauer, B. and Ettrup, B. 2002b, Environmental management in product chains (In Danish: Miljøledelse i produktkæder – en eksempelsamling), Environmental Project no. 41, Danish Environmental Protection Agency

The background description of each product chain case is based on a template with the following headlines (Ettrup & Bauer 2002):

• Start phase
• Product chain
• Environmental co-operation
• Environmental achievements
• Perspectives

All the consultancy firms have followed this template, but using different methods and different weighting of the elements in the template. The material represents a large pool of knowledge, but great caution with its heterogeneity should be taken.

The consultants have collected some figures about the involved companies, but the primary focus has been on more qualitative aspects of the environmental initiatives and their planning, implementation and embedding and the driving forces. The information collected by the consultants is primarily from interviews and from material from the companies about their environmental management systems, in case such systems were part of the environmental practice. Often the interviews have taken place in two steps. First with the initiating companies and then afterwards with external actors like suppliers or customers, which were identified in the first interview. The interview persons have been a mixture of environmental co-ordinators, sales persons, suppliers etc. The interviews have mainly been semi-structured interviews based on a list of tentative topics and questions. There have been differences in the focus in the case studies carried out by the different consultants. Some of them had the focus on the relations to the suppliers, while other consultants have included a focus on the internal organisation in the core companies.

The core companies in the case studies are from the branches shown in table 2.1.

Table 2.1: The distribution of companies on branches based on the categorisation done by the consultants in the case studies

Table 2.1 shows how the core companies are from very different types of branches and contribute to very different types of products and services. Also in terms of the number of employees are the core companies very different; from small and medium-sized companies to very big companies, as shown in table 2.2. Most of the companies are private, but a few are public owned companies. The environmental initiatives have in some cases focus on a specific part of a big company.

Table 2.2: The size of the core companies in the case studies

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Version 1.0 June 2008, © Danish Environmental Protection Agency