With increased acknowledgment of global climate change and warming, governments, consumers, and firms are responding collectively to create today's low-carbon economy. Carbon footprint labeling has developed as a meaningful instrument to motivate greenhouse gas emission reductions. This paper review...

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) are stakeholder-derived principles with measurable and enforceable criteria to promote sustainable production outcomes. While institutional commitments to use VSS to meet sustainable procurement policies have grown rapidly over the past decade, we still have ...

ISO 14001 is an international standard for Environmental Management Systems, adopted by over 36,000 organizations worldwide. This paper attempts to determine the length of time after which a given company has implemented ISO 14001 experiences emission reduction. The sample used is a group of 264 man...

During recent decades, the impact of industrial organisations on the environment has become clearly evident. It has also become more difficult to hide and more expensive. Globally, this has caused many enterprises to put all their efforts into seeking management instruments that allow them to reduce...

An expanding body of research is defining drivers, benefits, and challenges of adopting ISO 50001 energy management systems. The Clean Energy Ministerial's Energy Management Leadership Awards program requires ISO 50001-certified organizations to develop case studies of their implementation experienc...

Across Europe, there is considerable interest in establishing stronger links between environmental regulation and standards for environmental management systems (EMSs) such as ISO 14001. If it can be demonstrated that possession of an EMS results in improved environmental or regulatory performance, ...

Two types of private voluntary standards used in the food sector are analyzed in this article. Namely, sustainability initiatives that encourage best practice management on farms for environmental, social and economic gains, and also product carbon footprints (PCFs) that estimate the climate impact ...

Product carbon footprinting schemes adopt different analytical methodologies. The calculations can also be affected by limited data availability and uncertainty surrounding the value of key variables. The combination of these factors reduces the validity of comparing carbon footprints between produc...

Voluntary environmental programs are codes of progressive environmental conduct that firms pledge to adopt. This paper investigates whether ISO 14001, a voluntary program with a weak sword—a weak monitoring and sanctioning mechanism—can mitigate shirking and improve participants' environmental perfo...

This paper tests whether adopting the international norm ISO 14001 significantly impacts environmental performance in Quebec's pulp and paper industry. Using monthly data collected from 37 plants between 1997 and 2003, we show that: (i) ISO certification does not lead to a reduction in total suspend...

Energy consumption in the industrial and commercial (service) sectors accounts for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing this energy consumption will be critical for countries to achieve their national greenhouse gas reduction commitments. The ISO 50001-Energy management standard p...

The promotion of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) as alternative approaches to traditional environmental regulation has fueled numerous researchers to evaluate VEP performance. However, these studies have focused on assessing the environmental performance of a single VEP. As yet, we know litt...