Developing sustainability reporting - Case Cargotec - Aaltodoc

evised and disclosure is seen as an additive process where more is better. However, many of the
GRI indicators are not actually used in corporate responsibility reporting (Roca & Searcy 2012).
Despite their criticism towards the GRI, Moneva et al. (2006) acknowledge that reporting in the
future could better reflect corporate impacts since the GRI started to encourage companies to
report in a broad sense, expanding their reporting boundaries to reflect the “footprint” of their
organisation and its activities (including e.g. licensed manufacturers, contracted suppliers etc.).
However, the anticipation of Moneva et al. appears not to have realised as Kaenzig et al. (2011)
still criticise the fact that most of the GRI indicators are related to site-specific inputs and
outputs, ignoring the environmental impacts occurring upstream and downstream of the company
site. According to Kaenzig et al., most of the environmental impacts of many products occur
either upstream, in the supply chain, or downstream, in the use phase or at the end of the life
cycle. Therefore, they suggest that a limited number of product- and industry-specific KPIs,
rather than reporting of a wide set of environmental and social indicators limited to the site level,
would give a more purposeful assessment identifying the relevant differences among companies.
3.2. Life cycle approach to sustainability reporting
KPMG & SustainAbility (2008) find that readers want to see the sustainability impact of the
organisation. This indicates that it is important to report the environmental and social impacts
along the whole product life cycle. Similarly, Kaenzig et al. (2011) suggest that stakeholders
have started to demand transparency throughout the whole value chain as the focus of
environmental management is moving from cleaner production at the process level towards
greener products as a whole. The authors propose a stepwise procedure for improving the quality
and completeness of quantitative corporate environmental disclosures using life cycle
approaches. Kaenzig et al. explain that life cycle assessment is an “established analytical
approach to determine the environmental impacts and identify improvement opportunities of
products and services” (p. 39).
The first step of the procedure suggested by Kaenzig et al. (2011) consists of analysing and
improving the coverage and reliability of quantitative corporate environmental disclosures.
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