Mapping Corporate Environmental Performance

A new real-time map allows researchers and activists to more easily identify corporate polluters, but also allows companies to showcase their environmental performance.

Called MapEcos, the website marries information about companies' environmental management, which is provided voluntarily by managers in real time, to companies' pollution data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"Users can track factories' pollution activity over time, compare factories in their community, and compare the pollution of local factories to others in their industry across the country -- but just as important, monitor what mitigating steps facility managers are taking," according to an article in HBS Working Knowledge.

The resource was created by Harvard Business School's Michael Toffel with collaborators Andrew King and Michael Lenox.

Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

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