BITC Environment Index

Business In The Community (BITC) is a charity, which have provided a framework for businesses to benchmark their environmental and social activities for over 10 years.

The BITC Environment Index is the UK's leading self-assessed corporate environmental benchmark and is a stand-alone module of the BITC's broader CR Index.

Although some Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are already taking part in environmental benchmarking, this practice is not widespread in the HE sector. However, the HE sector is becoming under increasing pressure to demonstrate responsible behaviour and promote its sustainability.

In January 2007, the Universities That Count report was published, for which 20 HEIs took part in the BITC Environment Index. Participants were benchmarked against the results of the National Environment Index for businesses in 2005.

The key findings of that report were that the Environment Index overall score for the HE sector was 55% (the overall score for the National Environment Index for businesses was 83%), and only 5 HEIs fell within the Top 100, and only one within the Top 50. The HE sector scores dipped significantly in the Environmental Management Systems (EMS), Audit and Supply Chain sections of the Index.

As a result, we have carried out a mapping between what EcoCampus provides and the BITC Environment Index requirements. We found that by taking part in the EcoCampus scheme, HEIs would be able to meet most of the requirements of the Index.

The EcoCampus EMS can address all the issues included in the Index and produce all the evidence needed. We would therefore expect that HEIs implementing the EcoCampus EMS and wishing to take part in the BITC Environment Index, would obtain a much higher overall score than the HE sector score of 55%. The EMS and Audit sections of the Index would become high scoring sections and participating HEIs would have all the methodological framework and evidence needed to score higly throughout the remaining sections.

The EcoCampus EMS can therefore help HEIs to improve their environmental performance and ensure a much improved ranking in the BITC Environment Index, resulting in enhanced reputation.

To download the EcoCampus / BITC Environment Index mapping, please click here