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This chapter turns to the measurement of performance in delivering corporate and ecosystem purposes. The metrics are designed to capture the pain points in the ecosystem that need to be addressed and the success of the intervention in addressing them. This requires measures of non-financial as well as financial performance. The chapter provides an overview of measurements of non-financial forms of capital: natural, human, and social. In examining natural capital, it contrasts input measures that record the amount of natural resources that are used in the production process and output measures that examine the impact of the inputs on products, emissions, waste, etc. It notes that measuring inputs is in general more straightforward than outputs and it therefore argues that natural capital metrics should be constructed around inputs rather than outputs.
Businesses are under increasing pressure to improve the resource efficiency of their products and services. There is a need for practical tools that enable businesses to implement resource efficiency in their value chains. In this paper, a mixed-method approach for assessing the life-cycle-wide use of natural resources in products and services is applied in a case study on a coffee value chain of the company Mars Incorporated. Material inputs along the entire chain were assessed quantitatively using the Material Input Per unit of Service method, while a semi-quantitative Hot Spot Analysis was performed to identify environmental hot spots. This mixed-method approach has been implemented for the first time in practice to assess the value-chain-wide resource consumption and environmental impacts within a specific value chain of Mars Incorporated. The paper concludes that combining the methods provides better insights into the value chain than using just one of either of the methods alone. For the company, the approach has proven to be practicable because it identifies improvement options and their value-chain-wide resource efficiency potential.