Benchmarking

What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking is a means by which an operation can assess and improve its environmental, social and economic performance quantitatively. Benchmarking indicators establish the measures that need to be recorded by an operation. It is essentials that collecting benchmarking should involve practical, everyday measures such as the volume of water used in a year as shown by an operation’s water bills and the amount of electricity used.

Benefits of benchmarking

Environmental and social benchmarking will:

• Demonstrate contribution to protection of local and global environmental quality;
• Retain existing customers and attract ones;
• Improve profitability through greater efficiency and less waste;
• Provide a sound basis for environmental reporting to stakeholders;
• Attract ethical investment;
• Improve business-to-business opportunities and outcomes;
• Improve relations with government regulators;
• Enhance relations with local communities;
• Motivate employees.

The Eearthcheck Benchmarking system

The Earthcheck Benchmarking system is a simple web-based application (www.ec3global.com/products-programs/earthcheck/) which empowers operators to input data needed to carry out the assessment and reporting process and which allows the operators to track their performance annually in relation to baseline and best practice within the sector and implement improvements accordingly. The Earthcheck system, which was developed by the STCRC in March 2001 to simplify and standardize environmental and social benchmarking, offers a low-cost entry point in the journey to become sustainable. To do this the STCRC drew on a research team from over 17 universities to compile case studies and national reference data to create an adaptable tool that can be plugged in or purchased to allow an organisation to monitor and reduce its environmental impact. The Earchcheck Benchmarking system can assist an organisation to reduce cost in area like energy consumption, waste production and resource conservation by monitoring and reporting outputs.