MapEcos detail
MapEcos website monitors environmental practices of U.S. companies
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—November 28, 2007
CONTACT: Ed Winchester,
603-646-0597
HANOVER, N.H.—Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth professor Andrew King, together with a group of Dartmouth College students and researchers from Harvard Business School and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, has created MapEcos, an interactive website monitoring the environmental performance of more than 20,000 industrial facilities across the United States.
Launching today, MapEcos incorporates U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data on toxic pollution with survey results outlining steps plant managers are taking to protect the environment. The site is intended to provide an evenhanded view of the nation’s industrial environmental performance in part by giving managers a platform to publicize company efforts.
"For years, we have studied how businesses respond to environmental problems," says King, who founded the site with Harvard Business School professor Michael Toffel and Michael Lenox, an associate professor at Fuqua. "MapEcos lets us create a kind of natural experiment. We can make information more accessible and then see how firms respond."
Each industrial facility appearing on MapEcos is listed on the federal government’s Toxic Release Inventory, a database tracking the waste management practices of companies across a wide array of industries. Facilities on the map are color coded according to emission levels, revealing the pattern of industrial pollution across the United States. Visitors can also search for facilities by name, location, corporate owner, industry, and emissions level.
There, MapEcos users can access detailed information about each facility’s emissions and the associated health hazards, comparative information about emissions levels and trends from similar facilities, and—where possible—the practices the facility has implemented to protect the environment. In addition to highlighting strides companies are making, the site’s creators hope the easily accessible information will increase pressure on lagging facilities.
"We had conducted research on business and the environment for years, and we wanted to find a way to do high-quality research and make a difference at the same time," adds King, currently a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School.
Dartmouth College entrepreneurs Evan Tice, Chris Hughes, Loren Sands-Ramshaw, and Jason Reeves also contributed to the project, which combines Google mapping software with additional mapping technologies. "We were excited by the challenge of showing both the broad sweep of industrial activity and detailed information about each facility," adds Tice.
An expert on business policy and strategy, King directs a National Science Foundation/Environmental Protection Agency-funded research effort on industry self-regulation. He is also on the advisory board of Tuck's Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship, which helps students develop the skills to manage the increasingly complex interactions between business, governments, and the nonprofit sector.
Founded in 1900, Tuck is the first graduate school of management in the country and consistently ranks among the top business schools worldwide. Tuck remains distinctive among the world's great business schools by combining human scale with global reach, rigorous coursework with experiences requiring teamwork, and valued traditions with innovation.
|
