Measuring the Performance of an Environmental Management System at a University : The case of the University of Gävle

ABSTRACT EMS is a system that can manage the environmental performance and has been widely introduced in many organizations, like enterprise, factory, health centre, etc. The system focuses on reducing the environmental impact and providing reliable statistics to support future implementation. It responds to the proposition from the government, which shows that everything on earth should consider the sustainability. Introducing EMS to a university is rather a creative concept. In Sweden, University of Gävle (HIG) advocates the environmental performance should be controlled and it is a pioneer in introducing EMS to educational organization, and it got the ISO 14001 certificate in 2004. . In order to monitor the performance after it got the certificate, the university decided to keep environmental vitality in a way of making policies and rules regulating all the people studying in and working in the university. The performance would be shown in an annual report including paper usage, waste, the structure of staff, environmental impacts and energy consumption. And these statistics were mainly collected by the questionnaire distributed through the e-mail. This study shows how important the after-certificate maintenance is and its effects on the EMS. It is going to analyze the statistics of EMS reviews of University of Gävle from 2002 and 2007 and find out the effects of EMS in university together with the problem discussion. Finally it will provide suggestions to University of Gävle. Keywords Barriers Drivers Environmental Impacts Environmental Management System (EMS) HIG- University of Gävle ISO 1400