| In line with the aspirations of sustainable development, the traditional approach of economic growth-Grow/Pollute first, clean up later-is no longer being considered. A deteriorating environment has led to a greater awareness of corporate social responsibility. As a critical part of corporate social responsibility evaluation, environmental performance evaluation has become a systematic theory. In the reality, Chinese scholars started studying this area in the late twentieth century, which was comparatively behindhand than their western counterparts. Moreover, there are issues existing with the evaluation indicators and the evaluation system on the view of traditional accounting. It is thus imperative to establish a legitimate, practical and industry-specific environmental performance evaluation system, which is not only helpful to further deepen the study, but can also provide a pragmatic means for the companies to detect and solve the environmental problems when conducting business. In a long term, that environmental performance evaluation system will result in a better environmental management, more effective environmental policies, and sustainable development for companies.This paper summarizes research conducted on environmental performance evaluation and proposes to include both economic and environmental information into evaluation indicators by applying a concept called "eco-efficiency", which was defined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. In this study, chemical companies have been investigated as they are high energy consuming and polluting. An environmental performance evaluation model for chemical industry is proposed, with implementing analytic-hierarchy-process-based fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. One empirical study for the environmental performance in 2014 of ten public large chemical companies is carried out to test the proposed environmental performance evaluation model. The evaluation is in accordance with the reality, which proves the validity of the model.This paper makes contribution to the literature on new indicators for environmental performance evaluation. In addition, previously environmental performance evaluation for a specific industry has hardly been explored. This paper provides a practical solution and strategy for domestic business to assess environmental performance. |
