Background, Aim and Scope:
A significant shift towards services has occurred globally though service industry companies are still, typically, neglected when the significant environmental players in the society are listed. However, scientific evidence is increasingly showing that the service sector may produce a notable share of the environmental impact in the society. Unfortunately, very few quantitative studies exist that would have determined the environmentally significant processes of a service industry organization. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to quantify the environmental impact of selected service industry companies, and to identify the processes with the highest environmental contribution.
Materials and Methods:
A multiple case study method with life cycle assessment (LCA) framework using both process and input-output data was used to estimate the environmental impact of four service industry organizations in Europe and the U.S. The companies studied are all international or global companies, and the functional unit of the LCA is the yearly operation of the organization per employee. The firms chosen have noticeable differences in terms of size, location, and their line of business.
Results:
Regardless the significant differences in the size, location and line of business, the same activities were always found to contribute the most on the environmental impact of the organizations. The office premises clearly contributed the most (some 40%) to the environmental impact and commuting was the second most significant contributing factor (some 20%). The contribution of all the other activities, the business travel, the purchases services, the use of office equipment and the office supplies was found to be clearly less significant. The U.S. based case was found to produce constantly higher impact values than all the other cases. The range of differences between the U.S. case and the others were quite substantial: around two- to five-fold. Interestingly, it seemed that the differences in impacts were explained half by the differences in the surrounding infrastructure and supply chain, and half by the differences in the actual operating quantities of the studied organizations.
Discussion:
As the results were not particularly sensitive to the changes from company specific processes to the statistical averages in Finland, they could be expected to give a relatively good estimation of a typical Finnish organization in the relevant fields of services industry. However, services industry includes a broad scope of different kinds of companies, and thus the results would probably not apply for all services companies, for example, travel agencies and cleaning services.
Conclusions:
The result would imply that, in several services sectors, companies the office premises related processes could potentially produce significant amount of environmental impacts. In addition, it seems that the LCA method could produce added value for environmental management in services companies because, at the moment, the focus of the environmental objectives there appear biased toward activities not having high environmental importance.
Recommendations and
Perspectives:
Based on the results, many organizations could start their environmental work by concentrating on the office premises related processes. In the future, the environmental significance of services industries in the society should be studied more thoroughly, as the services industry could, based on the results of the study, offer an untapped management potential for sustainable communities.
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