Greening the Service Industries

Despite the dominant role service industries play in modern society, little attention has been paid to assessing and improving their environmental performance. In this research, environmentally related performance data for six different service organisations were acquired, and the organisations evaluated using a services-oriented matrix analysis tool. The greatest potential environmental gains that can be achieved by these service organisations are shown to be those associated with the design of the buildings in which the services are located and the ways in which those buildings and their contents are provisioned, not with service-related operations. These results appear likely to apply generally to all types of service organisations.